So with Stripe, is it industry practice to keep the fee when refunding customers?
For example, if I return something to Best Buy, are they still paying that 2.9% fee to their CC processor?
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For example, if I return something to Best Buy, are they still paying that 2.9% fee to their CC processor?
as far as visa is concerned, they're both just transactions, regardless of the direction, and they want their fee.
Here's a recent example from my life: About 10 days ago my partner sent $1000 to friends/family in another country and used the official channels that involves the nationalized bank in that country. It should have been there quickly, but took 10 days. There was no update the entire time and no phone number to call or other customer service channel to figure out what was happening. On day 3 or 4, a friend asked why she hadn't used this other private money transfer service that is known to be far more reliable, faster and with better customer service. With the government, there were still fees involved and the service was far less convenient/reliable.
Here's a fact of life: Nothing that requires the labor of other people will ever be free unless:
- the people providing the labor choose to do so and have the time to do so because they have some other means to support themselves; or
- someone voluntarily donates the money to fund both the creation of such a service and the maintenance of such a service in perpetuity.
- you steal money from someone else to pay for that labor.
Those are pretty much the only three ways that something requiring labor comes into being.
You can't just magically declare anything that requires human labor to be a basic human right and will it into being.
Of course this does not apply to everything. It's perfectly fine if not everyone has a private jet. It's not so perfectly fine if people are starving in the street.
However the EU forced the payment services sector to cap charges for businesses so you're maybe paying 0.5% or less on a transaction not 2.5% and that's why you don't see amazing cashback card deals or big discounts for cash in the EU normally.
Lending. Money sitting idle in accounts (moved into an account and not yet sent, or received, but not yet moved out) can be lent out to earn interest. That's how my bank can offer free transactions to all customers, both private and business.
Rights aren't granted, they have to be taken.
To the tune of "Yellow Rose of Texas" (from the Simpsons):
The yellow gold of Texas
Is what I long to save.
I will not pay no taxes
If I hide it in a cave.I agree, and I'm not arguing with you, at least not directly.
I personally think of "rights" as a kind of useful fiction that gives a kind of psychological "leverage" in politics. I understand that a lot of people think that that term has some sort of concrete real-world referent, but I don't. I've never read anything intelligible on the matter, e.g. the US Constitution says God endowed us with them. It's poetic but legally meaningless AFAICT.
So I really don't want to argue about principles. It smacks of theology to me and I believe in the separation of Church and State.
Bitcoin, for better-or-worse, already lets people transfer wealth without asking anyone for permission for very reasonable cost. One way I can interpret what you're saying is that governments shouldn't attempt to outlaw that.
But I think you mean more. I think you mean something like, constitutions should be amended to include EFT as a "basic human right", and that governments should provide the service too. Is that right?
Yes, of course. Rights are whatever we as a society decide they are. That's why I wrote, "should be considered a basic human right" rather than "is a basic human right."
> One way I can interpret what you're saying is that governments shouldn't attempt to outlaw that.
The devil is very much in the details here, and reasonable people can disagree. IMHO bitcoin is dangerous. The anonymity and inability to roll back transactions is IMHO a bug, not a feature. It makes it too easy to produce irreversible bad outcomes through negligence or malice.
> But I think you mean more. I think you mean something like, constitutions should be amended to include EFT as a "basic human right", and that governments should provide the service too. Is that right?
More or less. I don't think it's so important what constitutions say. What matters more is what the societal consensus is. Money transfer should be a commodity. Its cost should be somewhere in the neighborhood of the marginal cost of production, which is one hell of a lot less than the 2.5% the credit card companies charge. And that cost should probably be born by society as a whole, just like with most other infrastructure.