alt Hacker NewsCredit cards are much less heavily relied on in Europe than in the USA. Europe basically runs on debit cards that every kid can have and where the fees are minuscule. There are countless banks providing the service and everything is highly regulated. On top of that, Europe still curbed Visa and Mastercard several times for antitrust behaviour. And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established. They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
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> the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money washing and other illegal activities is pretty well established
I think that's very hyperbolic. In france most people I know carry cash and use it regularly (not as much as cards), the gen X and older tend to find it strange to pay for small sums (eg bread) with card. Germany is infamously almost cash-only. In many Central Europe countries, shops taking card is not a given (Bulgaria, Hungary).
Where may I read about anything supporting your statement "cash is primarily used for illegal activities"? I highly doubt that this is the case, unless there are more illegal activities out there than legal ones.
I'm not sure which European country you're talking about, but in France most transaction are now done by card. Yes it's mostly debit cards, but they're still handled almost exclusively by Visa and Mastercard.
Many banks have tried to start other electronic payments independent from those 2 (for example Wero) but it doesn't really get any traction.
So I don't see how the duopoly is any less powerful here.
> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities is pretty well established.
I'd rather have that than a complete loss of privacy.
The U.S. consumer economy functions primarily on debt from start to end these days, complete with debt collectors who buy it pennies on the dollar and then con grieving relatives into voluntarily accepting duty towards those debts that would otherwise have been discharged by death. So there are quite a lot of people these days who couldn’t use the European debit methods because they don’t have the cash and likely never will, what with one quarter of the country’s households unable to afford housing on effectively poverty wages. The federal government can’t crack down on this because they’d have to replace that consumer debt with public assistance. The puritanical / religious orgs control majority voting blocs that haven’t aged out as they used to and so are a continued threat to elected officials. So the threat those groups are holding over Visa/MC is triple-pronged: not only will they boycott (they can afford to), they can also leverage politicians (enforce our will or get ejected from office) and threaten capitalism (better economic armageddon than unpalatable sexual expressions). Valve can’t hold a candle to that kind of leverage, not without giving up the neutral-apolitical stance that most tech corporations prefer. They would essentially have to promote a counter-bloc of voters to counter-pressure the U.S. House and Senate into passing payment provider neutrality laws through elections. Valve is vanishingly unlikely to do this, and so their only choice is to prostrate to Visa/MC (or stop accepting USD) until the puritan bloc ages out in two or three decades. They can certainly afford to wait, especially given that these incremental religious bans advance slower than their revenues.
Debit cards are really common in the US as well. Pretty much every bank gives you one with a checking account and they’re accepted everywhere. You’ll have no problem never getting a credit card, aside from a couple of very specific cases such as renting a car where they’ll require a substantial deposit if you don’t use a credit card.
But it’s irrelevant to this issue, because the debit cards are still handled by Visa or Mastercard.
> because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
thats BS. most people have indeed had such, and while not frequent, it was fully legit.
The real reason they want to do away with cash is so they can monitor everything you buy, and in time, perhaps more
> And the idea that physical money primarily aids social fraud, money washing and other illegal activities is pretty well established. They even killed the 500€ bank note, because it was almost exclusively used by criminals and most normal people never even touched one, much less used one for legit transactions.
At least in Germany in particular older people prefer to pay cash if possible - this gives the banks also less leverage with respect to abhorent fees. Since many people in Germany neither trust the banks nor the government anymore, acting this way is very rational.
Also the arguments concerning cash restrictions are seen very differently by the population: since there existed two oppressive regimes on German soil in the 20th century, a lot of people realize that the restrictions on cash are just another step towards restrictions of the citizen's freedoms (thus I am honestly surprised all the time that a lot of US-Americans who are so freedom-loving and distrust the government concerning the restrictions of civil rights are not in love of cash).
Thus, in Germany there exists the saying "Bargeld ist gelebte Freiheit" [cash is lived freedom].