What if you woke up tomorrow and completely lost access to your bank account, credit cards, PayPal, and Venmo, all because of something you posted online?
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It has been happening for a long time now. Say something the government doesn’t like and suddenly your bank and credit cards stop working.
This is done through a perverse private/public partnership where the US government will give a vague instruction to deplatform an individual or group and a private company will voluntarily enact this de facto ban.
The government then gets to claim they are not banning anyone and the private company can say they reserve the right not to do business with anyone.
Hell it used to be common to not even allow women or blacks access to banking.
Good thing I deleted PayPal as soon as I heard of this. They can’t do shit to me.
Asia has a very unique financial system in this sense. They are not reliant on 3rd party payment processors that can be counted on one hand, and they usually support P2P payment between banks. They also usually prefer to use QR than NFC (like on wechat, line, and kakao). This is one example standard that I found from Indonesia called QRIS, and they are expanding it wherever they can. Of course Visa is upset about those lol (see the section about US Government response)
Yeah UPI is great too in India.
Remember that there exist alternatives to the big three US payment processors.
China’s UnionPay is pretty much global now, one can open a bank account remotely in Hong Kong or Singapore and go through UnionPay.
Russia’s Mir is the answer to the current geopolitical situation and the country being cut off from SWIFT, they are backed by UnionPay and are accepted all over Asia, Africa and increasingly in Latin America, many local banks in these parts will give you a card with Mir if you request it.
India’s UPI is also gaining traction in the subcontinent, in Europe Wero is rolling out as an answer to US dependency.
You don’t have to be a prisoner to the three American processors, even in the US and Canada, UnionPay is gaining traction as a result of the demand from the Chinese diaspora and business owners.
Competition is good for business.
Edit : typo car -> card
It is about time for Wero and Digital Euro do get fully implemented across the EU. Until then, there are at least IBAN bank transfer that can secure a minimum viability of financial needs. That is at least for the EU, Brazil, India, China etc have alternatives in place already anyway.
Link to article?
It’s there. More crossplatform issues. https://youtu.be/tyqEYDisiZA
Link to article?
Are you being intentionally dense? There’s no article, only video.
They are clearly implying that they don’t want a video, they want an article. I also would, but since there isn’t one I’m just hear for the comments.
Yeah, they’re also implying that it’s on the commenter for not understanding that, despite them only trying to be helpful. It’s just petty and pedantic completely needlessly.
Then there’s no information, only misinformation
It’s weird how hostile we are to reading, and how malleable we are to video.
I’m the same way about expecting people to cite real sources; incidentally, I caught a bunch of flak last week on Lemmy for asking for literally any other source than one self-aggrandizing vlogger.
Visa is already censoring the world’s porn. As if we needed more reason to hate them.
not just porn they are inserting themselves into every entertainment industry. all based on being control freaks. If you look at who visa vocally supports its a crazy rabbit hole.
For the USA and the rest of the world, Brazil has its own payment system as far as I know, and Europe is making one already, so jokes on you. Correct me if I’m wrong.
We have several, but are mostly country level. We are working on interconnecting them so payments and money can flow along the EU without any USA dependency.
And there is also the digital Euro for small payments, that is being also being developed right now.
International bank transfers and direct debit are already in place via the SEPA instruments.
You’re Rose. It says so right before the @
Class action lawsuit. Their terms and conditions when I opened my accounts did not mention this and further, updating those terms and conditions and then closing my accounts is not justifiable. Since I’m likely not the only one they will do this to, it sounds to me like they need to learn a lesson.
My online campaign to point out every time one of their executives has said anything sus would be legendary.
If things were shut down to prevent access to anything, I don’t think legal action is possible, or even the path to take. Probably why it would never be done that quickly or drastically. The art of oppression is knowing the limit of what people will put up with and not crossing the line, but moving the line slowly. Go too fast, the commons get upset and find their torches.
Almost like controlling the finance sector gives you an outsized control over the way a modern economy functions due to the fusion of industrial and banking capital into finance capital. Lenin wrote about this over 100 years ago.
Extend this thought to the rest of the finance sector - retail and investment banks control the flow of loans to businesses, investing only in firms and ideas that they believe will generate profit, while also being able to deny people access to funds at their own discretion.
Time for more monero
Pretty sure having a bank account is like an EU right, so banks can’t just close your account willy-nilly over some online post.
Yes, but VISA would hold the keys to the infrastructure that let’s you use it in in a modern world.
Visa doesn’t hold the keys to the WERO infrastructure. WERO is basically a facilitator to the system of real time bank transfers that already exists anyway on European infrastructure. It is not a credit card system in that sense, because the money goes immediately from one account to another, but so what?
Except for maybe international online payments, there are already alternatives, so I don’t quite see how.
WERO might be the EU alternative.
WERO…xD It sounds like a duck, it looks like a duck, oh, it’s a duck!
Stay informed about changes to the law, planned surveillance, and so on. The European “wero” system has to comply with European law… so everything will soon be under complete surveillance… It’ll be really great once eID and EUDI are in place… If you live in Germany and post something online that Spain, for example, doesn’t like, your accounts will be frozen and so on, because they’ll be able to bypass the banks.
So again: It sounds like a duck, it looks like a duck, oh, it’s a duck!
Ah, so the good old nationalist argument. If the EU exploded tomorrow, none of these problems would go away. But we would cement the control of third country services, totally out of our the control. Generally, given how decentralised power is on EU level it is often less hard to fight these things on EU level than on national level where the executive is often much more powerful and just steamrolls through with much higher success rate.
The fight against the surveillance state is something we have to face in any case, no matter the framework. A look at the Sunny Uplands in the UK should make that obvious.
Spain is not a third country, as an EU member state it is bound by the same fundamental rights charter that also applies to the EU level as well as to Germany. If that doesn’t cut it, then having everything purely national won’t make a difference either.
Needless to say that your comment does not even have anything to do with the Wero system to begin with, yet apparently it is a duck.
The way to fight the surveillance state is to keep the fight simple
Fight for free computing, keep encryption legal.
With those two you can build much more on top, like secure communication, Monero and other crypto, etc.
There is no need for a national currency like Wero
The problem with all of that is the “and other crypto” bit nestled in there.
You KNOW crypto on-the-whole is bad for humans, because the Orange Menace is promoting it.
Wero is no currency and there is nothing “national” about it either. At least have a basic idea of what you are criticising.
Wero has also nothing to do with your ability to use Crypto or whatever. It is basically just a wrapper banks are offering to make the existing European instant bank transfer system more accessible and easier to use and a competitive alternative to credit cards.
Extending the fight to basically anything isn’t keeping it simple. Are you also fighting against classic bank transfers and credit cards or are you only fighting against Wero? If so why?
Got anything to say? Or do you prefer vague accusations that could mean anything?
Not the banks, but the countries. The EU is getting the EU Wallet, and it must be linked to at least one bank account. This will allow other EU countries to enforce penalties and freeze accounts, seize funds, or whatever. Cool, right? 🤮
Imagine a country like Hungary decides to freeze another’s entire population bank account
The EU wallet is not about financial transactions, is it?
Also there are two systems in the making, one is the public Digital Euro, the other is the private Wero. Sure, accounts could be frozen but neither a single company nor the US could freeze out people out of their financial life.
Most likely it is an EU right, but violations would require a lot of effort to straighten, so I wouldn’t be surrised if they do sometimes close accounts willy-nilly
This is why I liked the idea of Bitcoin in the beginning. (Before it became what it is now).
I still like Monero. It would make shit like this impossible to touch by authoritarian idiots.
That’s why we Germans love cash. By the way, all it takes is for the government to face a crisis… Just look at China and its real estate crisis. Many people don’t use cash anymore, and they ran into problems when they couldn’t make digital payments or withdraw money, etc.
Lol wut.
Most banks in Germany charge you for taking cash out of your own account. It’s one of the most difficult countries to use cash without getting fined for using cash
I’ve only ever seen that happen when using an ATM that belongs to a different bank
Edit: But Sparkasse would be a great negative example, because your point would hold true there—since not all Sparkasse branches are the same—and special laws were even drafted specifically because of Sparkasse, since they were actually charging fees as high as three-digit amounts back then. That was legally capped at a maximum of ~€10 (I’d have to look up the exact amount).
Also ATMs have max withdrawals. And if you want to take a larger amount from a human at the window, there’s a fee for that too.
ATMs have fixed limits due to anti-money laundering laws. I’ve never been charged a fee for withdrawing cash at the counter. If you want to withdraw larger amounts, you just have to notify them in advance because of the legal requirements, but I’ve never been charged for it. At Sparkasse, though, I could imagine that might be the case.
AML laws don’t limit cash limits on atm machines.
There’s literally zero legal risk of money laundering with cash that comes out of an ATM. It’s already coming from a trusted source (the bank).
AML risk is when you deposit large sums of cash into a bank
Yes, it does have to do with the Anti-Money Laundering Act. This applies even if you make transfers of more than €10,000. The law is now set to be tightened further for cash payments exceeding €10,000. This change is being implemented by the EU in 2027…
I know this is off topic but the cc companies are going crazy from a state law that passed saying how oh it will be so bad because they just won’t be able to handle it at all and will have to pull out or something. eff em.