YC has also been very active in the space in both markets by the late 2010s.
A lot of the work around Pix is largely thanks to the fact that neobanks like Nubank have become very competitive in the Brazilian market, and helped set higher consumer and business expectations for transaction processing and management.
Pix revolutionised the way we transact in Brazil. I've used Pix to pay for things that cost only cents, and I have a friend who bought her house using Pix. The system just works for any transfer amount. And it's so easy to use.
Its speed is truly baffling, and so is its reliability. Never have I failed to make a Pix payment because of downtime. I never cease to be amazed by how fast money arrives in my Brazilian account when I make a withdrawal directly from my EUR wallet on Wise. I receive a push notification from my Brazilian bank before Wise finishes running the animation of confirmation of withdrawal. It's like magic.
And it's so widespread that nowadays I don't even question whether someone accepts Pix. When I get in a taxi, no matter how old the driver is, it's certain that they take (and prefer) Pix.
I've even had homeless people ask me for Pix instead of change on multiple occasions.
Cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance.
- You need to buy something from person XZ, whether an individual, small business, or huge business.
- XZ sends you an invoice (including relevant taxes).
- You pay the invoice. XZ knows you’ve paid.
- At year end you can download all your invoices, including any taxes already paid, for doing your taxes. (Brazil taxes make American taxation look simple.)
Standard workflow in America:
- “Do you want cash, mail a check, or PayPal/Venmo/Cashapp?”
- “Umm do PayPal but friends and family please… also it’s at my wife’s email that still has her maiden name”
- Zero detail on invoice (maybe a receipt printed on thermal paper or a random email) which you lose by tax time
Does it work internationally? Does it send USD as well, or only the real?
If it solves th same problems, why is Brazil considering banning self-custodial USD stablecoins? And why has there been an ongoing discussion about launching mBRL, and stablecoin pegged to the real?
https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2024/brazil-considers-...
There's only one reason I don't use it: there's no FLOSS app (AFAIK) to use it.
Something as common as the dominant payment system should not depend on proprietary software.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/brazil-suspends-w...
After I had to add a special animation for one email system so that user was sure that "the core functionality of encrypting" was indeed working (it took milliseconds in reality), your experience doesn't surprise me that much. But, in my "IoT" system we have a mix of devices. Our service can handle most requests in sub millisecond, but some devices (gprs) need at least minimum 1 second (20sec is still within time limit) to respond only because of slow connectivity. And then I have a parking ticket machines where you press button, wait 2 seconds, it beeps, then after 2sec it changes screen to "printing ticket", then after 2s you get the ticket, where everything can be a local action (free ticket without payment). Technology is wild.
Name one dominant payment system worldwide that doesn't? Banks are proprietary, credit cards are proprietary, paypal, crypto is all proprietary.
Everything from m-pesa in Kenya to Gcash in the Philippines to PromptPay in Thailand to Alipay in China to SGQR in Singapore to MPay in Oman....
The pattern is that these systems are nearly all fully centralised, require ID, zero privacy, usually government sanctioned, and not cross border.
No reason it couldn't. Bizum (mobile payments in Spain) started with just Spain but can now be used for payments across & to/from Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Andorra.
Bizum is also a member of European Mobile Payment Systems Association which I think will eventually lead to all members being able to make transfers to other members, but that might a somewhat dream rather than actual reality today.
There must be a non-repudiation and integrity check to verify transactions (e.g., in Estonia I sign digitally all my transactions), so the latter problem is easier to mitigate.
- You buy something and pay the stated price with money, phone/card or "blik" (free cashapp).
- Your taxes are already prefilled by your employer. If you have some "tax relief" items, you add it on webpage and make some clicks to confirm. If no reliefs, you don't need to do anything.
As a citizen of a still kind-of-functioning democracy, I'd happily make the trade if that means Apple, Google, Visa or Mastercard don't have the information anymore.
It's technically quite impressive - it's a large scale thing and it works really well. I can think of maybe one or two times in these years where I saw downtime, and in both cases it was working again after a few minutes. The usual experience with the government building technical solutions is to have something that makes little sense, is slow, and goes down frequently with even the most predictable usage peaks, but with Pix they really seem to have nailed it.
It does feel a bit weird to have so many payments go through the government's systems, and it definitely feels like it puts them in a position of having more information than they should. There's a lot of Orwellian surveillance potential there, as any transfers are necessarily tied to both users' real identities. I don't think there's a realistic way around this, though.
Another concern is that people can expose some of their information without necessarily being aware of it. You can register e.g. emails and phone numbers as Pix "keys", and then anyone can initiate a transfer to those keys and your full name will pop up so you can confirm or cancel the transfer. I've seen some clever advice around this - "When using a carpooling app (often details are arranged off the platform using WhatsApp), put the driver's phone number on Pix. If a name comes up and it doesn't match the name or gender of the driver's profile, something is up". Obviously though there's potential for misuse and I'm sure the vast majority of people don't think about this when registering their Pix keys. You can, however, just use randomly generated uuids as keys as well, a different one for each transaction if you so desire, so this one can be a non-issue with more awareness.
Overall though it's a very convenient thing which works surprisingly well, and the downsides are theoretical at this point. IMO it's a rare case of our government nailing something.
...except for inflation.
Nowadays one goes around with a direct link to his or her entire bank account. And criminals know this in Brazil. They will rob your phone, but what they really want is to use you as an ATM. Private banks are not held accountable to the massive and rampant identity fraud in banking, where criminals will launder criminal transactions.
The private sectors does not care. Somebody who opened an account yesterday receiving R$5000,00 at 2 in the morning in the middle of the street? Nothing suspicious... This same account cashing out at an ATM the same next day? It is OK to me...
Brazilian banks need to be held accountable to 'know your customer' laws ASAP and be held liable for criminal activity undertaken on their systems.
> require ID, zero privacy, usually government sanctioned
Unfortunately systems that don't have those requirements are going to be money laundering channels. I wish it wasn't such a big concern but it's unavoidable.
The practicalities are very different from transferring between say Brazil and the US.
As far as I can tell the legal landscape of the solution currently only allow the actual government to look at the data with the standard court orders. I believe not even the 10k report limit is applied to pix atm the same way as the other methods.
Regarding fake transactions, that would be a non concern to me, the system is only centralised in parts, the banks still hold most of the data so they would have to collaborate on this potentially leaving lots of evidence behind. Governments do not need to be subtle to screw you over, see current US deportation news.
Its not that much different than how bank transfers in Europe work in practice. The US is particularly archaic in banking technology available to the public.
Tangentially related, I've heard talk of EU alternative to VISA and Mastercard, which I also believe is the right direction.
While the Brazilian system is only interacted directly through your bank application, the Swedish application is a separate application tied to your bank account in the backend. Given the... quality of bank apps this is a huge plus. The Swedish Swish app is MUCH easier to use because it only does one thing. My Brazilian mother does not know how to send PIX because her bank app is very confusing and the PIX option is just one of many.
The BankID system of Sweden though is even more impressive than money transactions, pretty much everything government related (including healthcare, taxes, etc) and most private institutions (bank apps, Swish, digital contract signatures) is done through the unified BankID login.
People raised concerns over privacy, but the main problem really is that since these systems cut out the middle man (Visa/Mastercard) and have no fees you also have no fraud protection which is something to keep in mind when using them. Once you send the money it is gone, the banks will not give it back to you even if you got scammed. It creates a whole sort of scam industry in both countries.
* may: banks are allowed to charge.
- Weather apps: various governments do the (very expensive) computing and provide the data for free. Private companies insert adds, or charge you. I use Yr, which is run by Norway and has no adds or fees. They are just sourcing public data [1].
- Taxes: the government does all the bookkeeping and enforcement, tax prep industry copies and pastes numbers into forms it lobbies to obfuscate.
[1]: https://hjelp.yr.no/hc/en-us/articles/360004008874-Weather-f...
But payment processors in Brazil are already offering “international pix”, that Brazilians can use to pay foreign companies. It’s the same experience as pix for the customer but behind the scenes the company deals with the cross border payment.
There are even stores accepting pix in Portugal: https://www.publico.pt/2025/01/23/publico-brasil/noticia/pix...
Of course in practice it is a chicken-egg situation. Few people will use it over established credit based systems unless there are other incentives.
Credit card companies, including PayPal & Co, are essentially rent seeking: They are middle men that technologically aren't needed anymore for instant cashless payments, but they still exist because they can extract enormous amounts of profits via fees. But countries like Brazil and India show that they can be replaced with free or almost free systems based on instant bank transfers.
It's true that credit cards still have the use case of providing a "chargeback" service. But this isn't possible with ordinary cash either. Moreover, most people likely buy online from trustworthy shops like Amazon, so this isn't often a problem in practice. In expectation people spend way more money on credit card fees than they ever save with chargeback. Chargeback is like an overly expensive insurance that hardly anybody needs.
Maybe it needs up to 5 seconds to warm up if it's in deep sleep, so splitting this into three 2s periods provides the least frustrating user experience.
As soon as you need to deal with real hardware things always start to get complicated.
They protect against tracking and provide anonimity. That might be valuable.
It's used between private people to make it easier to send money to one another without having to type in bank account details, but never really used to pay businesses (except under the table).
How come this is so popular in Brasil for paying businesses vs using a card or your phone to tap and pay (which seems more convenient)?
Isn't paying with some phone apps the default in China? And I think transferring using phone apps has some success in Africa, too.
Most people are simple, they want to pay, and get paid, in their local currency. There's a homegrown software which enables them to easily do just that. That's a great technological and social achievement, it would be great if we could discuss that, and not crypto, which is not the main subject here.
Pix mostly replaces and eats on credit card transactions that were done for the convenience aspect and no the credit aspect. As well as allow a whole new part of the country to accept electronic payments, and although that would increase tax revenue from business it also substantially increase their revenue since there is no x% from card processors and don't require special rented/bought equipment.
Contracts on-chain can be slightly inscrutable in their bytecode format, but it's pretty uncommon for smart contracts to not be published with source code and a verifiable build.
Example, picked randomly from a transaction in a recent block: https://etherscan.io/address/0x388c818ca8b9251b393131c08a736...
A centralized – often socialist – government is the _definition_ of monopoly, you can't escape from it without risking jail or worse. No U.S. monopoly, no matter how much you hate it, will get close to this, and you think it does, you are sincerely naive at least.
> Unfortunately systems that don't have those requirements are going to be money laundering channels. I wish it wasn't such a big concern but it's unavoidable.
There same requirements also make the likelihood of these systems scaling beyong one jurisdiction very unlikely. Tourists don't want to set up a payment account for every country they visit. Or other way around, banks don't want to KYC and set up an account for every foreign tourist.
As Visa and MC work globally, I'm betting that the dominance from those will continue. Cryptocurrencies might have some change of becoming the "global" transaction method as well.
Even a small country like Denmark has multiple software and finance companies doing apps and software in the digital payments and banking field.
China also have a pix-like wechat Russia has a pix-like "BRICS Pay"
And those systems can be integrated.
PIX QRCode protocol already have a "currency" field, that currently only support the constant value of "BRL"
USA probably will continue to use check and printed money like the ancients do.
Although they can replace a lot (most?) of existing transactions that are currently done through credit cards, there is still a place for them.
Is this a joke? Of course it's cross-border, it crosses international borders. It works because the countries involved put in the work to make it easy. The fact that you can't use Pix in the US has no bearing.
But I think adoption is slow because everyone in the EU already has credit cards and fees are not paid by consumers.
There are so many powerful and influential anti/small-government that are rabidly opposing anything made by the government, and offered to the people.
The argument is always the same:
- "It will stifle innovation"
- "It is unfair to business"
- "It will make people dependent on the government"
- "It will give government more access to spy on the citizens"
and the list goes on.
For decades the American people have been told that anything the government touches will be expensive, inefficient, and lead to a more taxes. Private sector knows best, and all that.
And it is especially bad right now. You had MAGA-influencers outright rejoicing that DOGE had laid off the 18F team, spreading the gospel that free (government-run) tax tools are an abomination.
China, India, Brazil, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and others are all trying to expand their own transaction networks.
While it's still piecemeal, a Chinese or Indian tourist in Thailand can use UnionPay or UPI to transact without using Visa/Mastercard, a Russian tourist in Vietnam can use Mir, a Brazilian in Argentina can use Pix instead of Visa/MC as well, and a Japanese visitor in Singapore can use JCB instead.
Even the ECB has recently started considering this option (though it might also be an attempt to force the Trump admin to negotiate).
The biggest thing blocking international payment competitors is FATF, which has some regulations biased in favor of Visa/Mastercard.
> Cryptocurrencies might have some change of becoming the "global" transaction method as well
I'm not sure. Most jurisdictions that aren't the US and EU heavily regulate cryptocurrencies, and at best allow state managed or regulated cryptocurrencies, which basically makes the whole point of crypto moot.
By the same thinking we should forbid cash, too.
We have two ways:
Give up all freedoms, forbid anything and transform the society into a mass surveillance society where everyone spies everyone, where is no anonimity and no privacy.
Or require law enforcement to do a better jobs without people giving up their freedoms.
Until there will be a stable coin we can trust and which can be accepted by most businesses.
Despite rare reliability issues, my fear about it is that it requires a phone. Being so popular, i fear when places will refuse any other form of payments and accept only PIX, making anybody not using a phone unable to buy their products, with the common assumption that everybody uses it ("don't you guys have phones???"). You can't install banking apps on rooted phones or alternative mobile OSs (or is very very hard), so you are trapped with Android or IOs to use it.
I hope it doesn't come to that, but it seems it's going that way.
PIX (and similar systems like Sweden's Swish/BankID), don't have fraud protection, once you send the money it is gone with no contest possible. But when you send a payment with PIX there is 0 risk your account's money will get highjacked, at most you lose your one transaction.
But PIX is also accepted in many physical places because it has smaller fees, with some stores and informal commerce not accepting cards. I used to work at an IT service provider in Brazil around 2012 and one of the projects my company did was monitoring of those card machines. They actually kept GPS information of the machines and blocked them if they were moved around. Those card machines are surprisingly expensive in Brazil (or at least they used to be).
- no card
- technically not a specific app, its a payment method that any app with a checkout flow (for example) can chose to implement.
- you register some id with your financial institution of choice (any of CPF - equivalent to SSN, CNPJ - for businesses, phone number, email or a randomly generated key).
- keys are fully portable, as in you can revoke em or change the bank institution they're associated with any time.
- you can generate a QR code on the spot so the person paying can just scan it
- transfer is pretty much instant (under 5s seems to be the norm)
- no NFC (so works with any crappy phone)
- since its a bank transfer, and since bank transfers are insured up to 200k (afaik), its pretty safe.
Except for Hong Kong, they have their own thing. I just used Google pay there.
I disagree, although it is VERY complex the US system is much worse. At least the Brazillian one you don't need to pay for an application (TurboTax & similars) to file your taxes.
Cases in point:
- To transfer money to a broker, I need to pay around $5 in transfer fees via ACH or wire
- I want to change the custody of my stock market assets from one broker to another, and it will cost me $75 to move $60 worth of shares. Meanwhile, in Brazil, this process is free in every broker.
https://www.sharetechnote.com/html/Handbook_UMTS_RrcStateCha...
If I need to buy a gift for someone from a store at the mall, for example, I just text them, they send me pictures with the options, I pay instantly via pix and they send the product through local delivery. The whole thing takes 5 minutes of my time and the purchase shows up on my door in 30 minutes. I saved on time, gas and parking, and meanwhile the store made a sale through a local employee instead of me buying online from their national franchise for example (if it's a franchise of course). Win win for everyone.
I remember encountering that before London launched Oyster, probably inspired by it. Worked in station vending machines as well as for tickets.
There are also other security features tailored for the crime aspect of Brazil (since some people argue Pix increased the number of flash robberies); you can limit how much money you can transfer via Pix during day and night time, and even request a second confirmation before the transfer actually goes through. And if you prove you've been robbed, the bank can easily revert the transaction and you can get your money back.
It's a problem for the victims, but I don't think it's why there's a scam epidemic in Sweden - scammers don't care if you get reimbursed or not. I believe the root issue is the ease and speed of transactions - it's easy to get fooled in a moment of confusion, and before you realize what happened, the money is out of reach of the authorities - as cash, crypto or in foreign accounts.
It costing more for instant transfers is just a regressive tax on the working poor.
2024 has seen a surprising reversal, as cash usage makes an unexpected comeback, defying predictions that the world was moving toward a cashless society. With rising cybersecurity threats, concerns over financial privacy, and economic instability, consumers and businesses are increasingly turning back to physical currency as a preferred transaction method.²
¹) https://www.riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/brazils-shift-bac...
²) https://www.adeptswipe.com/cash-makes-a-shocking-comeback-as...
Our developer phones have like 40 apps on them to log into different test system, its madding.
In our system the pay system is also 'half' branded so you have to download 'TWINT-<bank>' not just 'TWINT'. Making it unnecessarily confusing and its literally the same app (from a user perspective).
It seems this Bank Id is an even earlier system adopted for modern SSO use-case.
I went to buy açai at a shop one day and didn't have cash. Only way I could pay was with Itau's iti, but I only had money in my PicPay account.
Pix was a godsend that saved us from the thousands of different, non-interoperable digital wallets the fintechs were creating.
1. Is there an easy way for a US resident to sign up for a Pix-enabled account (e.g. at a Brazilian bank?)
2. Can Pix be used easily for online payments?
If both are true, it seems like it could be used as a drop-in replacement to crypto for small-value transactions which are currently infeasible in the US due to transaction overhead and fees.
Brazil adopted banking cards very fast and I remember using them virtually everywhere in debit or credit mode as early as my first card in 2008, I never had to carry money around. But they require two things that are a problem in a Brazil sized country with a Brazil density and infra structure: cell coverage and equipment. So small towns, small shops, independent professionals, etc would not have them or even be able to use them sometimes. Even today there are lots of places with internet but not cell coverage (radio, fiberglass or other infra but no cell tower).
This was changing on its own recently, many companies launched new machines that are cheaper and allow more small vendors to accept cards (+ working over the internet). This is still worse than the free approach of pix (for normal people) and a potentially lower fee for companies. Plus it allows people to buy with something they will have on them way more than their wallet, their phones.
I was in Brazil last week and I had to use pix only a few times to pay: parking (beach lot), tire fix (very small shop on the road) and thats it, everywhere else I used my credit card. Even though they accept pix, its not that huge of a difference for traditional business as far as I can tell, the payment terminal will also facilite pix transactions.
ps. you can tap and pay with pix too! https://support.google.com/googlepay/answer/14615541
You wouldn’t want a foreign company with billions of dollars in their war chest in charge of your countries payment system.
I'd never even heard of this! Certainly never seen anyone offering it. Guess it got run over by lack of state capacity during Brexit etc.
> paying businesses vs using a card or your phone to tap and pay
These schemes (izettle etc) have higher costs. The poorer the country the more significant a low-cost business TX option is.
Do you have some counter arguments?
Both Visa and MC are US companies so there is where the profits go ....
From US Senate hearing : "This is classic, classic monopolistic behavior. Yet you're testimony...is you don't want any competition...I'm having a hard time finding that position defensible, let alone sympathetic...it's unbelievable the amount of money you're making."
Margin 50% ....
Pix has several rules that makes up for a nice UX, such as being free for personal use and a 10-second limit to get a response after a transaction.
Pix is an open source specification, btw: https://github.com/bacen/pix-api
- press button
- gprs roundtrip about button press with "no payment, free ticket" (2s)
- machine shows "printing ticket", asks server what to print (aka the idiotic unnecessary step)
- gprs roundtrip (2s)
- printer warmup? (?s)
- prints ticket
> to save power (and possibly SIM cost)
Nope, costs per sim are monthly per card, until you hit the data limit, then per MB. Those machines typically have enough power to keep connection alive.
But its design is very much hard to work with for international transactions. It has some risk rules and design choices that make this true. I believe this is intentional as Brazil wants to maintain pretty conservative currency controls.
But! Similar things could have been said about pix and online shopping rails. It wasn’t great for that as it wasn’t the primary use case. And that is changing fast so maybe the international use case will improve.
UPI in India for instance does international work well in a similar conservative currency environment.
If you can find a place that actually accepts it! It’s certainly not as ubiquitous as the local Napas247 QR codes.
The comment I replied to was claiming Bizum operating "cross border" showed that Pix could do so, so it is very much relevant in context.
It is a very special case of cross border. It is technically cross border but does not have the difficulties of cross border in all of the rest of the world outside the EU.
In any case it is arguable whether these are separate countries or just states of the EU. It has a common currency, a parliament that can legislate (in certain matters - rather like the US Congress) for the whole EU, courts, a central bank, a public prosecutor and many other "national" institutions etc. it also have the symbols of a state such as a flag and a national anthem (albeit both shared with the Council of Europe), EU passports state they are EU as well as the issuing country's name etc.
Even if you do regard it as a cross border one it is very much atypical and cannot be replicated elsewhere.
All that said, however, crypto isn't proprietary compared to traditional banking or other payment transfer tech in the ways that make crypto, well, crypto - the lack of third party intermediaries. Anyone can develop for crypto, and the capabilities of the network can be extended by properties of crypto tokens.
Any individual crypto token or network may be open source or proprietary with respect to its development and acceptance of outside contributions, but the ecosystem as a whole is amazingly interconnected and interoperable. This seems incongruous conceptually when crypto is framed in terms of being proprietary, because crypto is constantly reinventing itself in plain view, through entirely new networks and tokens, and out of sight, through the efforts of working groups and individuals to support and maintain existing projects.
I think it's entirely fair to call crypto proprietary, and also fair to find it not to be, but there's a world of difference between how proprietary bitcoin or even ethereum is compared to something like xrp. Who controls the network and who controls development are the key differentiating features among these axes to my mind.
Crypto could potentially be the best or worst of both open and proprietary worlds, but in the best case, crypto can be open in ways that are good, and only proprietary in ways that are necessary and sufficient.
If you have moved about 15 years before that, you'd have experienced the hyperinflation years and you've come to understand why Brazilian (retail) banking systems were always pushing the state of the art.
(You'd also understand that cryptocurrencies are not meant to compete with payment networks that have institutional backing, but that's a lesson for another day)
It's not different from what we had before.
EDIT: it didn't actually change a thing. Banks are still required to maintain transaction data private, and agencies, including the government, MUST obtain a warrant to break transaction data secrecy.
[1] https://support.kraken.com/hc/en-us/articles/support-for-mon...
> But unlike India, where UPI is run by an industry body, Pix is managed entirely by the BCB.... the BCB alone runs Pix’s infrastructure and controls the encrypted database that stores all transactions.... This concentration of power in a central bank is unusual, and has led to criticism. “Now we live in a democracy, but imagine if this existed under an autocracy and all your information was available to the government,” says the head of one prominent fintech company. He thinks citizens in richer countries would balk at the government having Pix’s level of access to all financial transactions. Also, if the system is ever hacked or breaks down, the fallout would be greater than if a single bank were attacked.
(Just looking at the privacy aspect) For something like Pix to have a chance at long term success in the US, there'd have to be unambiguous regulation absolutely prohibiting access by the government to transaction information that could be tied to a person. Preferably, it would be technically impossible to tie a transaction to a person/entity without going to the bank that facilitated the transaction and a warrant signed by a judge.
10 years down the road:
IRS: "if we could look at that, it'd be great..."
Police/FBI/NSA: "think of the children..."
etc.
Does this mean that you also don't use your bank Android/iPhone APP? So your entire financial life is handled via a browser?
Because I think the whole government are inefficient and suck is partly a self fulfilling prophecy.
Swiss railways or how Taiwan created the semiconductor industry from scratch comes to mind. Estonia E-Government. Or like the Panama canal?
VISA, Mastercard, HSBC, UnionPay, ICBC, Santander... Or is this all Brazilian technology?
The difference is that Meta is privacy data hoarder, not that it's a foreign company. And it's not "in charge of countries payment system", because that's pretty-much impossible, but "one of the payment systems in the country".
The point is there is a steady decoupling towards non-Visa/MC payment systems outside the US and EU, and it wouldn't be too surprising if a number of these systems begin supporting inter-operability within the next 10 years.
https://www.bcb.gov.br/estabilidadefinanceira/pix?modalAbert... (Brazilian Portuguese)
See also relevant regulation for the instant payment system (SPI):
https://www.bcb.gov.br/estabilidadefinanceira/sistemapagamen... (Brazilian Portuguese)
As payments have shifted from cash to digital this control has shifted to private sometimes foreign entities with their own view of what payments are permitted and which aren't.
I suggest switching to a better bank. This is unreasonable, my ACH transfers are free.
> I want to change the custody of my stock market assets from one broker to another
$75 sounds like a bargain, given the complexity it involves: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/how-acats-transfers-w...
But anyway, I recently transferred some assets between brokers. It was free because the sending broker's fee to transfer assets out only applies when transferring the whole account. The receiving broker is happy to receive the assets, and shouldn't be charging any fee.
Yes, of course it is. How could anybody think otherwise? What is the worst thing Visa can do and what is the worst thing Visa has done? What is the worst thing the government can do and what is the worst thing the government has done?
Put house on sale? bankid. Book a doctor appointment? bankid. Login to bank? Bankid. Open bank account? bankid. Sign contracts? bankid.
Heck I moved my pension (like a lot of money) to a different institution by just using BankID. Didn't have to call/email anyone, the process took 5 minutes (with about a month to actually process the transaction).
Then our national weather institute launched their own app without tracking or ads, and the existing weather apps all immediately joined up to sue them over it. Thankfully they lost the case.
https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie-en-contact/Organisati...
(If you're reading this, please note this comment was written in 2025)
The umbrella interoperability initiative that includes Bizum is Swiss (neither EU nor Eurozone).
Maybe you have a radical viewpoint, or maybe you're just unfamiliar with the subject matter, but individual EU countries are very much separate entities, notwithstanding many helpful treaties.
There are lots of transnational entities like the EU and monetary unions like the Eurozone.
There's nothing so special about this arrangement that means it couldn't happen elsewhere.
https://empsa.org/news/leading-european-mobile-payment-solut...
As far as I understand SEPA ICT was developed by the Euro Payment Council. An industry body. ECB TIPS, albeit maintaining compatibility with the scheme, provides an harmonised service across the entire Eurosystem and beyond.
Everybody accepts cards and Pix. Even beggars on the street use pix.
If I revert back to using public transport I will probably have a use for cash, but that's the only situation I can think of where it would make sense.
And you can also use the bank account number, effectively replacing older bank transfer mechanisms like DOC and TED.
Due to it's commercial origin, Alipay is filled with unwanted ads and traps. Almost every time I made a payment with it, a pop up prompts me to enlist their Ant Financial LOAN service either now, or being prompted for the same question again 30 days later (yep, not Yes or No, but Now or Later). It's just fucking ridiculous, I don't need a LOAN for a $400 projector, and I don't need a LOAN for a $4 hair cut (Xi should probably do something about it, really).
I'm glad that at least people of Brazil don't have to suffer that kind of shit. At least their government-run program is better scrutinized and boring, thus more dependable, that's a good thing in my eyes.
But we must also be realistic if we want to win against our eternal enemy Eastasia, and admit that Facebook coin would never be a monopoly because Visa, Mastercard and cash exist.
At least with PIX, you scan the QR code directly on your online banking app, so there's no risk of going to a "fake site" (and the app also displays the information extracted fron the QR code, it's not a blind payment).
Most people don't have to do much during tax season nor keep any receipts. You download the declarations of your bank, receive one from your work. Fill them out on a free software and you're done in 15min.
Only gets somewhat complicated If you have lots of deductibles and you have to prove them, that's the same everywhere.
The bad thing is that Pix shows it will work for many, many years.
2. Yes, it's quite easy
Wasn't the Fed going to launch their own take on UPI with FedNow?
After dealing with many private sector services, I think a lot of things should be government run.
For instance: weather apps. Private sector ones are just a vector to track and sell your location data, and they rely on government data anyway. It'd be much better the government roll out an API and an app that uses it, so you can avoid the private sector altogether.
I actually think it took too long for Pix to be invented. The piping was all there. Somebody just had to have the idea.
Even in the 80s you could easily transfer from any bank to any other bank.
On top of that, it will provide the said information to government agencies if asked.
Lucky you. I've been living here since i was born. :(
Pix is surreal. It was launched in the Bolsonaro (mal)administration, designed by the proverbially incompetent public work force, and is as Orwellian as can be. Its code is nowhere to be found.
The funniest thing is that is has been adopted feverishly by the rabid right wing crazies, the same lot who want to destroy everything 'government'.
I take pleasure in listing three of the problems:
1. Lack of Transparency
2. Potential for Abuse
A government-controlled payment system centrally-controlled, with no auditability? Oh please give me more (/s)
3. Censorship and Political Control
So what? Sweden has it's own Swish system, Sweden is well integrated in EU, Europe and Eurozone yet it only works within Sweden AFAIK.
That Bizum works across four countries is not a given just because they're all within the Eurozone. Just like how Brazil and US would need to figure out how to send electronic money between themselves if Pix was available in both countries, so did Italy<>Spain<>Portugal when it came to Bizum, which is a private company btw.
Both Swish and BankID have fees. After all, they're run by for-profit corporations.
Those apps also reduce competition in the banking sector since they're controlled by a few banks which generally have very high fees on their other services.
What's even worse, since BankID is private, there's no individual right to get it, and I've personally experienced banks abusing their oligopoly (buy this extra service or you won't get BankID from us).
The Swedish situation is a nightmare which nobody should try to emulate. Fortunately, the Swedish government has finally announced plans to introduce a public government eID, although 20 years too late.
And if a government decides to just ignore those, it will also have no need to watch your transactions or create fake ones.
PIX is only for locals as you need to register with a CPF (Brazil ID number which is hard and tedious to get as a tourist). I ran into many scenarios where the only option was to pay with PIX and the staff aren't used to tourists and look at you funny when you explain you can't use PIX.
Also beyond PIX, if you try to book buses, planes, or take out a gym membership, while you're within the country, 99% of the time it's shockingly impossible to pay without a CPF, even by credit and debit card. I've even seen this for paying the laundry machine.
I'm sure the PIX system is great for Brazilians, and it was helpful having a local friend to make payments on my behalf, but Brazil really lives in a bubble where it seems a side-effect of their system is making things actively very hard for visitors to operate within the country.
You can also generate a R$0,00, print it and leave to the other person input how much will be transferred.
PS: Pix is so trivial to us that only in places like HN we can see how amazing it is
The requirements are fairly simple, but the liability is extreme so that most banks across the world generally are loathe to do this unless you have some kind of resident visa and professional+ income or a large net worth.
If the foreign (Brazilian) bank fails to do so then US cuts off their access to USD.
As a practical matter casual offshore banking for middle class or lower Americans is closed off, the message broadcast loud and clear from the government is they would prefer you to use crypto as a substitute.
btw, Pix is not an app, it is a service/infrastructure that can be used by any bank
Credit card fraud protection uses a private-only legal process. What is the worst kind of legal process.
That's not true; PIX requires your bank to provide a way (called "MED"[1]) for you to request a reversal up to 80 (!) days after a transaction. It can only be used in case of fraud, and it may take up to 7 days for the bank to analyze the situation and deny/allow your request. If it's allowed, you'll get the money back in up to 4 days.
If the bank denies the request (i.e., if they conclude there was no fraud) you can always sue the transaction recipient; you'll have access to all necessary information since they must be registered with some financial institution to be able to receive a PIX transaction.
So it's not as easy as a credit card, but I think it's fair for a free payment service.
[1] in Portuguese: https://www.bcb.gov.br/meubc/faqs/p/o-que-e-e-como-funciona-...
https://blog.remitly.com/money-transfer/complete-guide-brazi...
But seriously, it would still be a monopoly on the UPI-like segment. Visa and Mastercard charge fees that make them less attractive to some users and make it harder on some users. There are good reasons Pix replaced much of physical cash use that cards didn't. And Visa and Mastercard are also American companies. Don't they sell transaction data?
And meh, at least I can vote for my president, but not even the Facebook shareholders can vote Zuckerberg out IIRC. Although Zuck can't arrest me so I don't know.
And the claim in the first article is about using cash at any time. And it's by a ridiculous small margin. So in fact it's claiming that almost half of the population doesn't use cash at all.
It is possible to pay using NFC now
- SPI: responsible for the payments
- DICT: responsible for mapping keys to accounts
The API documentation of those services are available, but only banks can use them. When a person wants to send money to another, there's an option in the bank app for sending through Pix.
Then you have many options to define to whom you'll send that money:
- typing the bank account information
- using the Pix key (which can be an phone, email, CPF/CNPJ (brazillian documents) or a generated key)
- scanning a QR code
Note that the two latter options don't require the account information. That resolution is done by DICT.
After that, you type how much you'll send (sometimes the QR code already contains this information). Then it'll send through SPI.
And yeah, it's really, really fast.
So although only Finland uses Euro (and rest have their own currency), you can easily transfer money between persons using just their mobile number as an example.
https://exame.com/economia/questionado-por-apoiador-bolsonar...
I have also used it on airline websites, Aer Lingus and Wizz Air.
Until this line I forgot crypto was even competing!
And you keep repeating these old-fashioned stereotypes?
Does crypto? You may have heard of this thing called "tariffs" lately. Even purchases of software licenses are tariffed in Brazil[1]. The average person purchasing goods with crypto is just going to ignore this and several similar laws.
If you say crypto works to transact internationally, keep in mind: so does TF2 hats.
1: https://www.machadoassociados.com.br/en/2021/05/brazilian-fe...
Sweden is actually in a pickle here. The dominant but private BankID doesn't satisfy all security requirements for the EU's digital identity wallet. It just isn't profitable.
The government is now working on a public government eID with a higher security standard, but many Swedes might still be left out since adoption will take some time.
This is one of many reasons why eIDs shouldn't be run by for-profits corporations, and sadly nothing would likely have happened without pressure from the EU.
But most countries didn't have that capability. Kudos to Brazil for putting something together for domestic digital payments so as not to rely on a foreign company.
Sounds like WeChat Pay. It's been years now that beggars in China only carry QR codes.
> Cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance.
They solve a different problem or have the potential to: predictable/unbiased money issuance and on/off ramp for payment platforms.
The president of the Brazilian Central Bank is accountable. Zuckaberg isn't.
i’ve worked on internet projects with the feds before, basically the current iteration of the federal government does not really seem capable of doing these things because of how the rank-and-file is structured.
i think it would also be important to make sure that control over payment isn’t abused. i recall when donations to wikileaks were effectively blocked by public/private coordination. presumably that would be even easier if it just required public action.
Regarding the rest, I'm not following Brazilian politics that closely, but if politicians try to stop a democratic transition of power, then any functional democracy has to deal with them. I don't know how you can do that without doing things like jailing those who were involved. We can't do whatever we want and then call it political prosecution.
Having your card stolen, either physically or virtually, becomes much less scary.
When used responsibly, with rewards programs, the numerous benefits over cash make sense even in the unusual case where cash payments get a discount.
Zelle and debit cards have similar kinds of protections that make it safer than cash, and there's an audit trail. Though, it is more dangerous than credit cards.
And, obviously, credit cards let you borrow money which provides flexibility to allow payments even if your paycheck hasn't yet arrived. And occasionally, going into debt intentionally can be wise, when making an investment.
Government programs could offer these kinds of features, but betting on long-term competence, customer service, and innovation in the public sector is a losing proposition.
Having both public and private options works as an intermediate approach.
But, particularly for lending, the process of determining credit-worthiness is not a government specialty, and making it subject to the political process seems like a losing proposition for taxpayers.
Payments are a more valid area for government involvement, but even then, I'm not sure what it could offer that Zelle doesn't.
and yet Switzerland is not one of the countries where Bizum can be used?
The UN does not have a common currency or a parliament etc.
realistically, the workforce that was hired around sorting through hundreds of thousands of bureaucratic paper documents in the 70s/80s is not the same workforce that can really build new products and the feds are mostly the former.
In the US, it seems that 3rd party systems like Venmo are lightly monitored when it comes to payments for minor crimes. But I imagine that would change when there is a single government controlled payment system with total transparency.
"Can I buy some milk today? No!, let's visit our branch first and give some papers which will require significant time/effort to get for you."
Most just not experiencing things like this but once that happen it is hard to ignore this possibility.
That said the EEA capped interchange with the explicit goal of making these fees painless to business owners, i.e. similar to the actual cost of handling cash, and we have PSPs charging as little as 0.5~0.7%.
While adoption is indeed slower than in developing countries since people are used to card payments (rather debit than credit by the way), the popularity of mobile wallets such as Swish, Vipps, BLIK, ... is actually pretty significant in a good number of countries, and at the same time, an increasing portion of the population uses Apple/Google/Samsung/... Pay and doesn't care about the physical card anymore. Given that the EU has forced Apple to open up its NFC payment feature, we can perfectly imagine a pan-European federated payment scheme take off in the near future, using EPI/Wero in the Eurozone and interoperable local players outside.
The foreign corporation will always be exclusively interested in doing things to me that generate revenue for them.
frankly i find the american healthcare system quite good if you have good job-tied insurance. most of the problems arise because we don’t have any sort of triage for high need issues and thus get overutilization and high cost.
1. https://building.nubank.com.br/pt-br/nubank-acquires-us-comp...
2. https://building.nubank.com.br/clojures-journey-at-nubank-a-...
Economist what you think central bank does exactly that this is somehow too far?
I came across this recently as well. This is one of the most insane aspects of our current zeitgeist.
In a world where VC unicorns and megacorps commonly engage in dumping behavior to coerce market share, public orgs still need to walk on eggshells so they don't outcompete the "uwu smol bean" private sector. Even when they are providing what could be considered a public good or necessity, like weather info. Totally insane.
You better hope that your interests closely align with those of millions of your compatriots.
And that no one with political power has a personal vendetta against you.
securitization and anti-globalization makes us all poorer, worse off, and more prone to conflict. lawfare is an addictive drug and can lead to serious outcomes, as history in Brazil shows any number of times - like even with the current president.
Oh no, my government might be run by nazis -> Let's make the government services crap
The nazis don't need to use your crap government services, so you're just pointlessly making things worse, this is the same delusion as "But it's illegal". Why on Earth would crooks care whether what they're doing is legal?
I suggest:
Oh no, my government might be run by nazis -> Ensure this does not happen OR leave
"Speaking to the The Palm Beach Post at the time, Barry Myers said he supported the weather service returning to its “core mission … which is protecting other people’s lives and property” instead of spending “hundreds of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of ‘warm and sunny.’”" Also from the same article: "He told ABC News in May 2005: “We work hard every day competing with other companies and we also have to compete with the government.”"
Theres some more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lee_Myers
There is even less reason why a person would, most people in regular jobs get paid via bank accounts (Brazil even have a special kind with no fees for it). Now informal (non registered and non tax paying) employment is cash heavy: house cleaning, small repairs, produce vendors, etc.
I don't even think is criminal, it's kinda Business as usual in Brazil.
Money usage fell in Brazil, pix is the most used method, 37% of the workers are informal (no formal labour contract). They would mostly not be required to even report because of low income, the evasion in this case is being done by the employer, where they don't pay labour and the social security equivalent.
not trying, jailing. Soon, we will have the second jailed presidential candidate in less than 10 years. Many Brazilians do believe that this is a sign that the Justice System is working, tho.
Sorry if I misunderstood you, but just as tip, make it clear in your question. Probably the downvotes are from people who are tired of having Brazil being associated with drugs, crime, corruption and sex while it is a giant country with so many things to offer, and with so many hard working people doing their best.
But answering: just like any other country. Cash, jewels, money laundering, etc. Pix is not a replacement (at least so far) for cash, is just a modern option. And I really question if it will be someday a full replacement. Pix is amazing, but for a daily use (in restaurants, physical stores, etc) it is still more practical to pay using cards as Pix takes a little time to grab the phone, opening the bank app, scanning the QR code, typing the PIN and hoping that the internet connection is good enough for that
Preventing convenient payment technology only hurts the rest of us. If you want redundancy buy gold coins.
Watching the Indian and Brazillian governements solve this problem by by building the payment networks themselves and removing the profit incentive has felt vindicating.
- PIX project started in 2016, public launch in 2020
- It was not "launched" by any President; the Brazilian Central Bank is an independent authority, with it own mandate, not a branch of the executive power
- PIX was co-developed with institutions of the financial sector
- It's a protocol that participants must implement, not an app. The specification is even on GitHub. I don't know what you mean by "its code is nowhere to be found".
- The Brazilian Central Bank is acknowledged as a benchmark, rather than "proverbially incompetent public work force"
I really want a system where I can transfer money effortlessly but I also want a guarantee that I won’t be restricted access to my banking.
It is also single currency - Euro only, right? Swift is global.
Dealing with many currencies and laws (e.g. countries with capital controls) is very complex.
It is run by the banks themselves though. I like the 2 minute codes aspect of it.
> Cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance.
Yeah, if you enjoy having your money one hundred percent controlled by the brazilian government. I can't think of a more frightening proposition. You do realize this is the country that once suddenly confiscated everybody's money directly from their bank accounts, right?
Why did they do that? Runaway inflation. Just like its fellow latin american neighbors, Brazil has mismanaged all of its currencies and it will inflate the real to zero just like all the others, it's merely a matter of time. Just look at the country's economic situation. BRL is an absolute garbage currency. Why would you even want to hold onto this crap? You're better off holding USD if you can. You're better off holding real property if you've got the capital. You're better off holding bitcoins.
Cryptocurrency? They're basically the light at the end of the tunnel. You say you've lived here 20 years. Surely you know that judges are basically gods in this country. And we have judges admitting in writing that it's essentially impossible for them to seize or in any way touch your bitcoins without your secret keys. Do you seriously believe they have no chance? In this place? They're basically the solution to nearly every single problem in the "government is stupid" category.
Surely you know that the brazilian government sucks at pretty much everything except taxing you. And you're advocating for a system that essentially implements nation wide financial surveillance. Because our number one priority is to make taxation of an already heavily taxed people even more efficient, right? So that the politicians and judge kings can enjoy their world tours on tax payer money?
Pix is very convenient. That's all it is, and unfortunately that's all it needs to be to win the hearts of people. People won't be smiling after the government starts blocking their Pix keys for arbitrary reasons, preventing them from participating in society.
some buses in the surburbs of big cities only accept cards nowadays and you can recharge it online in 3 minutes (ofc if you are a citizen... brazilian goverment websites is a huge UX pile of shit; police, mail etc.)
I'd prefer a constitutional mandate or guarantee that this can't happen. Without it this is a noose. A convenient noose with lots of nice properties but a noose none the less.
Our federal government is huge and our state governments are small. Precisely the opposite of how the founders configured it. This is part of the problem.
The states need to band together and develop a cooperative solution and then push it upwards to the federal level.
This is a lot easier than centralized planning and management of an entity the size and scope of the US. We have a lot of offshore territories and two states. This complicates things more than people care to admit.
Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil - it's not even used in other Mercosur countries, what's the chance of having that adopted in other countries... And, that's problem #1.
How much do you trust your government with your money? A system like Pix don't stand a chance to get a worldwide adoption - maybe people are naive but governments won't unify to adopt a common system controlled by just a single entity / country.
What we may however end up with, are dozens of systems like Pix, one for each country, union, etc. Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant (see point 1)
I speak from direct experience in these words as the architect and founder of multiple acquired payment systems over the decades because this past December I was contacted by an African country seeking to build, own, and operate their own payment platform backed by their energy reserves. The concerns and threats around a country's monetary system are real and in time we will see more and more countries taking up this initiative to cut out the middlemen.
As a bonus over and above countries moving in this direction we can also see businesses doing the exact same thing over the last decade. Thee who controls the money also has induced influence over the users of that money as we see this more and more through 'progress'. Feel free to replace the word "money" with the word "data" in my previous statement as well.
Stay Healthy!
corporation NEVER has my interests in mind, so coordinating millions is easier
>And that no one with political power has a personal vendetta against you.
same argument can be used with corporations
You bet. Every pix transaction is reported to the brazilian authorities.
I use Crypto for everything you've mentioned. It's instant, almost free, and alexandre(he deserves a lowercased a) can't take my money if he feels that writing his name in lowercase makes me unworthy of my civil rights.
the central bank admin. director says physical money is still the base of brazilian transactions [1]
[1] https://exame.com/economia/dinheiro-em-especie-ainda-e-a-bas...
[0] https://www.ecommerceupdate.org/noticias/brasileiro-esta-dei...
You're far too optimistic. The current administration is trying to work itself out of a major economic crisis and there's nothing they would like more than to tax the crap out of every single Pix transaction.
I guess you want to say "only option _beyond cash_ was Pix". Most places should accept Passport ID to replace CPF. But if you found hard to pay using credit cards, that has nothing to do with Pix...
The only hope for any system is if the people fight to not live within these kinds of fascist states. Crypto is not some magic solution - and has a lot of downsides which are mentioned often.
How much worse is that than the same thing happening when you do something a private company doesn't like?
And how much different is that than what the Federal government could already do? If the government says you're a terrorist, you're not accessing any banking.
Swift is just a messaging standard and a message exchange network (distributed). SEPA is that, plus a settlement system (in a nutshell). That allows for speed and much more (instant payments, request to pay, pay by phone number, credit/debit transfers, etc).
You're bound to deal with currencies once you make any kind of transaction that originates in one currency and settles (finishes) in another.
The thought does occur to me. Quite frequently in fact.
My parents lived through the military dictatorship. They once asked me to stop posting online because they were afraid I'd become some kind of target. I'm not kidding.
> The only hope for any system is if the people fight to not live within these kinds of fascist systems.
Brazilians in general tend to agree with you. That's the end game of quite a lot of brazilians. "The only solution for this place is the airport", they say.
Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error.
Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant
And somehow less relevant than cash.
I can take cash from any country in the world to my local bank, and deposit it into my account. I can get a dozen different foreign currencies at my local branch in minutes, and almost any other currency in the world can be delivered to me by FedEx the next morning for a flat $10 fee.
I can take cash to any other country in the world and get it converted into the local currency, whether that's paper or digital in almost any city.
Crypto is great if you do a very few, very specific things in a vanishingly small number of places. But if I'd tied my finances to crypto instead of cash, I'd have been stuck many times in foreign lands.
To you second point, I think the pix penetration/popularity proves that the majority of the people trust the government for that. There are 2 key reasons for its success: It was mandatory for Banks to adhere to the system and there are no fees for using it.
Once multiple countries have their own PIX, they just need to build a federation structure to connect them and allow cross-border transactions.
Crypto-currencies have their place with people who don't trust the government, want to speculate and/or simply want to do tax evasion, but they are not and probably never will be mainstream as a transaction medium.
> Having your card stolen, either physically or virtually, becomes much less scary.
I assume Pix and UPI (India) offer indirect fraud protection by keeping payment records. At least in Brazil and India, fraud does not seem to be so bad as to require the regular use of credit cards.
> When used responsibly, with rewards programs, the numerous benefits over cash make sense even in the unusual case where cash payments get a discount.
Nobody was talking about cash. Neither Pix nor UPI nor FedNow are cash. Cash = coins and bills.
> And, obviously, credit cards let you borrow money which provides flexibility to allow payments even if your paycheck hasn't yet arrived. And occasionally, going into debt intentionally can be wise, when making an investment.
That's balanced by the fact that it can also be highly unwise. Moreover, for most payments, borrowing money is simply unnecessary.
> Zelle and debit cards have similar kinds of protections that make it safer than cash, and there's an audit trail. Though, it is more dangerous than credit cards.
Again, cash is irrelevant here. Moreover, any advantage of instant payment systems with fees hold only insofar they (the advantages) more than outweigh the cost of the fees. The expected value has to be positive compared to UPI & Co. Which seems unlikely.
Sounds like WeChat Pay. It's been years now that beggars in China only carry QR codes.
I saw a guy at a freeway offramp in north Texas with a Venmo (?) address scrawled on a piece of cardboard.
I make a point of carrying cash. Especially for buskers. It's just so simple to push the "cash back" button at the PoS when I'm buying something else.
(I miss the days when you could buy a CD from a talented busker.)
Apparently Wise had a PIX functionality here in Brazil, but it seems that they removed it for some reason.
Usually you have to go register for a card somewhere. It's just not practical, especially if you're just visiting. I've never seen a place where you could buy a card at a newsstand for a week or something like that.
Source: https://www.bcb.gov.br/content/cedulasemoedas/pesquisabrasil...
Because of that there is a total inclusion and also utter surveillance. So now in Brazil there are 2 problems, 60-80% of financial transactions are processed by the government and to add to the damage the entire economy is run on one point of failure which is WhatsApp. If at the same time, 2 of them would stopped, let's say for 3 weeks or maybe less, entire COUNTRY would do down the drain.
All the alternatives are fading away, lots of people don't even know how to change a ringtone on the phone but know how to do everything through WhatsApp. Try to ask, not even demand, in random business to provide you with alternatives for contact, you'd get that look saying GTFOOH. If pix would stopped, people would not go to atm to withdraw money, they'd wait until it'd come back online. When WhatsApp stops for few hours it feels like Sunday morning before the picnic.
Government+meta=success story of Brazil
While Pix is a very impressive system, they offer no benefit to the customer over credit/debit cards. Only benefits to the merchants. For inter-personal transactions it is great, and for micro businesses. But as soon as your business grows beyond that, you will want to accept card payments.
If Visa and Mastercard sell transaction data, can you point me to where I can purchase this data? Everybody is saying this is the case, but forgive me for having doubts. Is this what you are talking about? https://usa.visa.com/solutions/visa-commercial-data-solution...
From what I understand, they are selling data in the aggregate, not individual transactions.
Most people want something that works well in the ways they care about.
People turned to piracy because it was a superior experience to the then-distribution-models.
Then, the majority of people didn't care that iTunes / Steam cost money and had DRM, because it provided a superior experience to piracy.
People want an outcome, easily, reliably: they don't care about the method of getting that outcome.
after learning a bit about other countries, i would argue that we are better than most, we just compare ourselves with first world european countries, but even when comparing with USA we are fine in a lot of fronts
If you are at a institution bank, probably but that's a non-existent use case - I never had Argentinian Pesos, Turkish Lira or Bulgarian Lev I suddenly needed to deposit into my bank account !..
> Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error.
I'm not sure whether you travel much, but I always travel as a digital nomad. I pay small transactions with local cash or mostly bank cards as everybody does. But big amounts? That's where crypto comes into play. I've paid in crypto transactions worth a few thousands dollars because that's the only way to do it without incurring huge transaction fees and / or long processing time.
Months for specialists sounds bad (during covid the waits in the Bay Area got pretty bad), but for context on the NHS, they are currently targeting having more than 65% of patients served within ~5 months and they don't even make that target. Even the extremely capacity constrained Bay Area isn't close to that level of dysfunction.
GNU Taler ensures that the paying customer is anonymous while the merchant is identified and taxable. This is great for privacy, but not very attractive for commercial companies as your revenue has to be fully based on fees instead of making extra money by selling your customers data. The Swiss National Bank showed interest in adopting it some years ago, but I haven't heard much anymore since…
In less than a week most of the country would already have migrated to a new messaging platform.
With the harmonisation and almost free nature of ECB TIPS, becoming mandatory for all European payment service providers by the end of 2025, that figure will keep growing: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/intro/events/shared/pdf/fs22...
This right here is the reason why governments won't use it. Governments want transactions to be traceable so that they can audit your taxes. I don't have any issues with that, I actually don't mind paying taxes, but I would never expect a government, no matter how progressive, to use a privacy-based protocol or solution.
I wonder about a few things.
Is it safe? I'm pretty sure everyone not carrying cash is very good for physical safety, but can someone be coerced into emptying their bank account at knifepoint?
Are there scams? Can stolen money be retrieved?
Well, it's completely different, because ostensibly I can switch to another private company. Is there an option, ever, for me to just change which government I subscribe to?
> If the government says you're a terrorist, you're not accessing any banking.
In the US this can only be true for foreign citizens. Broad classes of assets and liquidity are well protected for US citizens unless you end up in the unusual situation where they sue the money itself. If you have cash in your hand nothing can stop you from spending it.
Thank you for introducing political relativism into this conversation, although, I'm not sure it's advanced anything in particular.
Cryptocurrencies will likely never go away, and will remain in use for certain use cases from a cross border value transfer perspective, similar to gold; either the token moves or the ownership is updated. More interesting is offering digital wallets for a single or basket of currencies to anyone you can remotely identity proof in the world (similar to nsave [3]).
[1] https://www.volt.io/real-time-payments-world-map/
[2] https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/fmis/nexus.htm
[3] https://www.nsave.com/ | https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/nsave
The payment system is the part that imho makes complete sense, in multiple ways: more competition in a market dominated by two US networks, strategic independence wrt to a critical infrastructure, providing a public good for underbanked demographics,... I don't get why places like the ECB, Bank of England, Bank of Canada, PBC,... (the US Fed is one of the few not pushing too actively in that direction) insist on bundling the two together instead of focusing on the payment system. If you succeed there, the potential for success is massive, without needing a central bank money feature, as shown by Pix and UPI. Getting one such feature right is hard enough, I don't get why they don't just focus on that and leave the central bank money baggage by the wayside.
[0] Central Bank Digital Currency, a form of money that has similar UX to bank accounts but represents a central bank liability, as opposed to commercial bank liabilities like your usual bank account. It doesn't need deposit insurance, it's legal tender and is at the same level as physical cash economically (M0).
[1] see eg https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpops/ecb.op326~d5c223d9b...
Other than the EU and UK, which other major CB is considering CBDCs alone?
Numerically, most people I know in the space are heavily motivated by the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) model both India and Brazil have been using, and DPI has been a hot topic in the DevEcon space for 4 years now.
In fact, Indian and Chinese lobbyists now compete with each other across Africa for DPI related infra work (Biden admin even helped support India's evangelism of the Indian DPI model in ASEAN and Africa), and Brazil's Pix has seen significant uptake in Argentina and Uruguay.
And most regional economies like Vietnam, Pakistan, Nigeria, and South Korea have similar implantations
The big difference might be public versus private domain experience. In newer economies like BRICS and much of ASEAN, the infra and norm setting work fell onto regulators. But in more developed economies like the US, UK, or EU, similar developments could be done by the private sector.
We "had" to get swish (and a debit card..) for our 12 yo daughter because cash is just not very usable here. Although the CC is still used more than swish, but for transfers between persons, or smaller companies swish is very common.
I really dislike the lack of a more anonymous way to transfer money but given how prevalent scams are here I feel like there was no better option.
Also, before PIX bank transfers required a person's full name, full CPF number, full account and branch numbers so arguably PIX is helping to improve privacy a little bit.
However the big issue is when people register their phone numbers as PIX keys because it means strangers can easily get full names from phone numbers.
This is something they really need to work on, just add an optional extra layer or cool-down, to slow everything down. You dont necessarily HAVE to have your transactions be immediate, waiting a few days would have been fine in our cases.
The ones I mentioned, eg, Canada [0], China [1]. But it's really most of them [2], the US is rather the exception.
[0] https://www.bankofcanada.ca/digitaldollar/
And most of the countries on that list are either implementing their own payment infra or leveraging India, Brazil, Russia, or China's.
It doesn't hurt to have a CBDC - it gives you a seat at the table when norms and global regulations are made.
I find very likely Netflix or Amazon will be one of the first companies to support this in June now.
This was made initially to replace old school automatic debit for phone/electricity/etc bills, but it will support all services.
In Brazil, installments with credit cards are also super common... Basically when you put a credit card on any website or buy on a store, you can just choose to pay in 12x.
Well, they will add in September Pix Installments as well.
> I'm just questioning the bundling with central bank money
In most countries excluding the US, EU, UK, and Canada, the Central Bank also sets financial regulations and provides the infra backbone for fintech, and in some cases still own commercial banks.
By having central banks attached to these projects, it helps build a testbed so private sector players can then extend on.
Most countries aren't like the US where private sector investors are open to investing in innovations, so it would fall to the Central Bank to begin testing and implementing these products.
around Paraty -> Angra dos Reis region you can literally visit/stop in more than 25 beach spots with the buses who circulate that area
and it's really nice that it helps the bus drivers. it even saves some time on embarking, which can add up in longer routes. godspeed on a single card (state agnostic) for the entire public transportation system (metro, bus, trains) in Brazil
Again, you can get all of that without needing a CBDC, just have the central bank build and run a regular payment system. It gets substantially more complex once you make it a CBDC, making the chance of success even smaller. For what gain? You actually introduce some tangible risks for the financial system, the fact that it's regulated doesn't eliminate that. See eg [0]: "Threats to financial intermediation in steady state arise mainly in situations where the central bank balance sheet expands, and triggers adjustment mechanisms that lead to more costly or less stable funding of the banking system, while in crisis times run risk may increase." The typical way to address those risks are holding limits, which add operational complexity (you need an overflow logic, you need a draft logic if you want to enable payments greater than the holding limit), and put some limits on programmability [1].
[0] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2024/10/11/Cen...
and the transaction size limits is also too low, for me (I think you can send multiple in quick succession though)
to avoid random fintech platform and bank scrutiny for normal transactions and the higher scrutiny given to international transfers, I've used crypto for over a decade. For investment, to pay or be paid by vendors in other countries. Places where paypal/wise/revolute/n26 will flag, hold, or western union was the only option. This hasn't changed in that decade, only more onramps and offramps for crypto has changed for more proliferation.
once our crypto is within our respective domestic jurisdictions, cashing out typically has an extremely fast, non-scrutinized option, similar in speed to Pix
another comment mentioned that the Bank of International Settlements is working on instant cross border transactions, I suspect the scrutiny and transaction size limits will remain inferior to the unlimited size that crypto provides, and lack of scrutiny that a transaction converted to a domestic transaction will provide.
Been using stablecoins for a decade and the transaction costs have dropped as blockspace has become more abundant, and the stablecoin issuers create and redeem for free.
there is also the benefit of not needing the domestic currency or banking rails, since the crypto ecosystem has many investment options for different risk profiles, and many vendors to pay for goods and services.
It is very common that people do not find this competitive because they aren't aware they have a problem, or don't have a problem. But many people do encounter a friction once they branch out into another industry to try to change their circumstances, or earn larger amounts. That attracts enough people to crypto.
> Again, you can get all of that without needing a CBDC
Yep. Pretty much.
> For what gain?
Because if X country is doing it, Y country should do it as well, and then export the associated infra to a less developed country. By the 2020s, it became a completion between Chinese vs Indian consultancies (ay least in Africa)
You have to remember the Cryptocurrency bubble was going strong until 2023 when the FTX scandal happened.
Hiring a team of 20-30 engineers isn't that expensive for a moonshot that makes it easier to negotiate if that moonshot somehow actually has an impact on global finance.
Of course, most moonshots fail, but it still doesn't hurt to have something back of pocket or build some infra if needed.
Fine keep using crypto as a store of “value” but as a way to handle day to day transactions it has failed.
That's not a fact, in fact it's typically the other way round, issuing a currency is generally profitable and the profits typically flow into the general government budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage It's managed by the central bank, though, btw, which is considered separate from the government for governance reasons.
Of course, none of that stands in the way of creating public payments infrastructure.
UPI is owned by NPCI(gov entity) and runs on top of IMPS both the networks are strongly regulated by RBI the central bank.
There is fair amount of regulation and KYC/ AML requirements before an app/service gets direct access to the network and even then it can be pretty challenging. WhatsApp struggled for years to get UPI integration .
Holding money in a wallet has even more regulations than merely transferring it .
Payment networks tend to centralize by their nature. I see pix or UPI as competitor to Mastercard or VISA , they have proven it is possible to run a network far cheaper than claimed
"Which one's the donation to the rebels?"
"The Monero, obvously..."
The deployment of SCT inst is mostly complete and Wero (EPI) was launched in 3 countries already. Things take a bit more time when you need to push standards and regulations to 11/27/36 countries. Overall banking and payments in the EU/EEA are pretty advanced and evolving at a decent pace given the market size and number of entities involved, the PSD is world-class.
No one pays FX fees on each transfer. Single large rebalancing transfers allows them to actually move money at optimal times and rates with bulk discounts. Then they can currency hedge and get larger spreads on the actual fx rate.
Given the dimension of Pix, I never heard of someone losing money directly because of using it (for example, here in the past was common to see where credit cards were cloned)
> can someone be coerced into emptying their bank account at knifepoint?
There are limits of use. Banks have different settings for limiting the amount of money that will be transferred in different situations, like when using their apps outside a trusted network, at night, etc
> Are there scams?
Just like any other payment method. I dare say that it is even safer, as some banks (e.g. Nubank) alerts if you are trying to transfer money to a suspect account.
> Can stolen money be retrieved?
Perhaps if you contact the bank, but as far as I know it is not a feature :-(
You're joking right? I just did a $25,000 wire internationally with a currency exchange in the middle and it cost $75. It went through in one business day. You'll get more hassle trying to withdraw from your exchange than that.
When I bought my house and did the wire it cost $15. Where are you getting huge transaction fees?
> Brazil, installments with credit cards are also super common... Basically when you put a credit card on any website or buy on a store, you can just choose to pay in 12x
Yea that kinda makes sense. The market dynamics in Brazil reminds me a lot of India albeit better regulated (thank you OECD reforms), but tbf, there has been a lot of cross-pollination between Brazilian and Indian policymakers - Cambridge MA is that kinda melting pot, and Brazil has a very similar political dynamic.
Most people in Brazil won't do this so who gives a shit? You may as well say, "now try to use Pix on the moon!"
I meant to say "you don't" here.
Meanwhile you could transfer $25k in crypto to Dubai and walk away with it in cash at an OTC desk in an hour via a wallet to wallet.
It's not a new scenario. It happened to me.
I'm not mildly inconvenienced by some honking. That's just aggravating. I'm inconvenienced by having to call to get a receipt.
https://www.businesstoday.in/world/us/story/march-to-indepen...
Meanwhile in reality: soory, out services are not available anymore because your goverment did a hecking bad thing and we don't like it. And we are taking the rest of your money btw
Just keep studying CS. Climb up the ladder to Staff SWE, PM, or EM; and execute and lose hair from there.
As Pastuer said, "fortune favors a prepared mind". Most hot thinkers today were hetrodox a couple years ago.
You make more money remaining in tech and then switching in your late 20s to late 30s into policy. You can also make more realistic and less ideological policies that way. If you have a protonmail, let's catch up.
But tbh, the policy space sucks. It's not worth it (in DC, Beijing, London, or Delhi). If you are smart and lucky enough to break into policy but are also someone who's Mom and Dad don't have a liquid net worth below $750,000-1M in all those countries, you won't make it irrespective of country.
Class breaks all nationalistic barriers, and public school class people like you and I won't make it without luck or money (and we can make the latter in the private sector)
P.S. love your blog. Similar boat.
Off-topic, but: this is possibly one of the world's dumbest rebranding exercises. I forget now how many years ago they made the change, but I've never heard anyone outside the company itself refer to it as just "Wise" without adding "(formerly transferwise)".
It's also used to give alerts to electricity companies, etc...
Their weather prediction, it's just way better than any other service.
There's also national service, run by CPTEC/INMET, but they are lacking funding IMO...
And the cards are hybrids, they support both visa (or mastercard) and mada.
the belief that democracy is some sort of bulwark against government surveillance is mindbogglingly naive
Conspiracy theory? It's cyberpunk stuff, the likes of which we see in fiction. Only it's not fiction. We're watching the whole thing unfold right before our very eyes.
I remember watching videos of people at events from many years ago. They warned us all about this stuff, explored all the possible consequences. It's pretty bleak. And now I'm living in this reality, the knowledge of the danger weighs down on me every day where I have to use the system. And people like you come here and calls us conspiracy theorists.
Pix is still doing record of transactions, every month.
https://g1.globo.com/economia/noticia/2024/12/23/pix-bate-re...
I would loved to have used it in Argentina & Brazil.
I tried to find a way to use Pix as a tourist (I'm from New Zealand). It would have been really super handy in Argentina tourist destinations (lots of Brazilian tourists so Pix accepted). Argentina was so painful for transactions I ended up buying Argentine Pesos using crypto. Argentina missed out on thousands of dollars export income from me because I hated their payment bullshit so much that I just left Argentina and went to Brazil instead (with different shenanigans). Turned out I enjoyed Brazil more too (great people).
I also wanted to use crypto because it is such challenging fun to play with using it for money (versus speculating), plus I wanted to learn how to manage the risks of using crypto (so I was willing to pay spreads and risk losses; since I highly valued educating myself).
One American I met had taken thousands of USD in cash to Argentina because blue dollar exchange rate (cambio / cuevas) to gain much better ARS per USD than other ways to pay as a US tourist. More reliable too (I had a few problems paying by card which sucked).
South American governments charge expensive fees and have crappy exchange rates to withdraw their money from ATMs: foolish foolish foolish dickhead governments. I hated their greed so much I just won't return to Argentina (goodbye 10x - 100x the export income versus the gains they nicked from me). Plus ATM limits to withdrawal well below a couple of hundred NZD (or USD) so I couldn't withdraw enough cash to spend - just damn retarded - print some more ya fools. Result is I'll warn friends against travelling to some South American countries (especially Argentina). Tourists are fickle - treat them fairly and make it easy for them to spend money, or they'll visit a different country that cares about earning export income. New Zealand has heaps of tourists so I know both sides of the equation (Overseas visitor arrivals to New Zealand totalled 3.3 million in the 2024 year; with a population of 5 million).
I really really loved Brazilians - I'd return ASAP if Chilean LATAM airlines didn't dominate costs (USD1600).
A system like Pix (or UPI from India) would be a godsend for Mexico. However, any such system should have support for tourists (non-residents visiting the country briefly).
It was pretty simple and worked well, especially compared to having to give bank account details.
That being said, I am in Australia now which has a similar system and I'd say 95% of my friends just give me the bank details instead of saying 'just use PayId with my phone number'.
I do not see how this is better than cryptocurrency, which, while not fully anonymous aside from Monero, is at least decentralized.
Nothing stops people from making it a right.
Brazilians have that right. Everyone can get a free checking account with transfers and Pix at every bank. They still try to sell us "service packages" but the idea of paying a fractional reserve bank any amount of money is just stupid if not abusive. They should be paying us for the privilege of having our money deposited into their reserves, not the other way around.
Brazil Journal too, but it usually focus more on market as a whole. https://braziljournal.com/
But most of the news are usually covered on Infomoney, Valor Economico, with the together with daily market coverage.
NeoFeed and Brazil Journal focus more on "high-quality", less content.
At least most aren't as intrusive as Alipay, but they do exist.
Yes, sorry for not being clear, but this is what I meant. When the average person uses crypto, they're not using an open source app to buy/sell it. They'll be doing it through a propriety service, with a non-open source front-end. That service will build on top of a lot of great open source tech yes, but the final layer is very likely a private company.
I know there are open source options, but my understanding is the overwhelming majority of human trades won't be using them. My point is, refusing to use pix because there's not an open source mobile app is odd to me.
When you use Pix, your money is not in custody of the government. The money goes to/comes from a standard commercial bank, just like a wire transfer. What the government (Central Bank) does is just the infrastructure for moving money between bank accounts.
The point about not being a global standard is valid, though. Although there are initiatives in progress to connect similar instant payment systems from different countries as other users have noted.
There's a reason Wise is a huge business and people in Canada resort to "Norbert's gambit" to exchange currency with minimal transaction costs.
You can pay with Pix in Paraguay since the largest privately owned payment processor implemented it and it's available within all payment terminals (POS) across the country.
The government of Paraguay also runs a similarly good system called SIPAP, that is replacing card payments because it's faster and free to use.
To add to this, this is already happening. For example, you can already pay in the Middle East with India's UPI at quite a lot of places, or with China's Alipay or Unionpay.
Reference: https://www.gonuclei.com/blog/upi-vs-pix-unpacking-the-simil...
You'd be surprised how bad FAANG is, too.
It's a permissioned system.
Crypto is intended to be fundamentally different. Good crypto is permissionless. If you own it, you can spend it, regardless of what anyone thinks.
Note that it is from a bank app (Nubank), Pix itself is not an app. Other banks have similar interfaces
The recipient's name and part of their ID are displayed on the confirmation page. This allows you to verify their identity, as the name must be linked to a real ID.
Users must set transaction and daily limits, with any changes taking effect only after 24–48 hours.People are encouraged to maintain lower limits.
Since transactions are tied to real individuals, it becomes easier for law enforcement to track down the recipient after a scam is identified.
There is Wero, I guess similar to Pix as an alternative for instant payment like PayPal, but it's meant to be used with your bank account and not a lot of banks support it.
You can’t say the same about the US and its actual oligarchs.
(The corrupt part is true)
WhatsApp currently has 600 million active users in India and has been the most popular app for a long time. If it had been granted permission in 2018 it would be the most popular UPI app now. There wouldn’t be a competitive app ecosystem like there is now.
Eh, the money was printed by government and any value it has is based on how much people trust their government. Using government payment processor is small potato compared to those...
Of course, the real deployment will need redundancy, failover, multiple levels of audit records, etc.
But still, modern computers are _powerful_.
There is no way to “get rid of cryptocurrencies” at this point save for shutting off the internet. It is not within the power of the state to prohibit, any more than prostitution or cocaine.
> How much do you trust your government with your money?
Do you trust crypto companies? Mt. Gox, FTX, Bybit…
Do you know that crypto companies must follow government rules, regulations, and laws? Russians were banned from using many crypto exchange platforms. China has strict rules for its citizens. You can buy and sell crypto in Brazil, but you must use only Brazilian reals.
Pix isn't global, but no one government person outside of Brazil can block this system.
MasterCard, Visa, Amex, and UnionPay work worldwide, but only a few countries regulate them, can block their usage, and can use data for tracking and statistics.
Pix is free to use, so no one needs to pay an additional "tax" to MasterCard and Visa (it's about 3%).
Google and Apple cannot say that if you want to pay, you must use only our devices.
> Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil
Now, try to buy ice cream from street vendors using any crypto coins.
Similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/politica/por-decisao-de-moraes-...
What kind of non-authoritarian country arrests people for merely cursing at politicians on twitter?
Moreover, what kind of non-authoritarian country issues hundreds of thousands of rulings by its Supreme Court?
The Brazilian Supreme Court is an unelected entity that has complete control over the country, and firmly issues unappealable censorship arrests.
There is absolutely nothing this tyrannical in almost any western democracy, sans the UK.
What if they deny service to or apprehend the assets of people they politically dislike? Also couldn't they crush any hope of anyone's profitable business? Could a person or business function without it? What about in ten years?
What if they track people by their transaction and built profiles of them? They could essentially make it too dangerous to do business to people who are disliked.
Heh, only an American would say that. What a peculiar worldview.
Could've at least gone with calling themselves "Wise.com" or something, like "Make.com" does.
Got nothing on "X" though. Have yet to hear someone in person say "on X" rather than "on Twitter".
I can't say I have a good alternative. The co-op model works for supermarkets on an international scale, and for banks on a national scale (I am unaware of any international co-op banks). I wonder if it could work for payments.
Creating efficient payment rails for its own currency is one of the most obvious roles for government imo. If the government provisions the currency, why would they not also provision the infrastructure (like the printing of the paper money).
That said, you’ve not offered a good rebuttal to any of OPs concerns, just repeated how good pix is within Brazil…right now with their current government.
Digital payments does present a uniquely frictionless route for tyrannical governments to assert power should they ever decide to weaponize it…unlike paper money which is harder to control.
Also, international payments is absolutely an issue with these systems. So you hate crypto due to its 2010s association with annoying Twitter bros. I get it.
But what are you offering instead as a solution to global money? Paying Wise stupid currency movement fees and waiting for them to close your account because you tried to buy a house for your family in the country you moved to?
I've been a loyal user of wise for more than a decade, since I used them to pay for my cross-currency wedding, and I can accept the name change since they wanted to show they were more than just money transfer (but just make it "bankwise", ffs), but the new brand style was a disaster.
Notice they dialed it down over time,it's now more neutral than at launch, so someone must have listened to the complaints.
Which is also its primary drawback.
Transactions are non-reversable, which inherently makes it unsafe for wide-scale use. Consumer protection is so important, clawing back payments is an incredibly important part of that.
Wrong copy-paste and all my money could just be gone forever? Yeah no, that's never going to fly in countries where consumer protection is seen as an important public good and always expected.
What you tout as a plus, is a major negative for the vast majority of people in developed democratic countries. In quite a few of them, access to a bank account is even a fundamental right.
And all that just because of some abstract fear? nty.
You haven't met any foreign people then, BankID is a common complaint among international students. I've moved to Sweden recently for university and getting BankID was/is a nightmare. It requires you go get a bank account (which I don't want nor need, and has yearly fees), and since the ID card we get from Skatteverket does not have NFC, we need to go to the bank to setup it on a new phone every time (at least on SEB). And getting a bank account is not a simple process either, it took me like 3 months doing paperwork (and had to mail it physically, they don't do in-person appoitments for this), and I'm an EU citizen. Obviously for Swish you'd need a Swedish bank account, but my point is that you should be able to get a digital eID from the government without any other requirements (like I got my physical ID card from Skatteverket).
The money that they issue? Your question is radically flawed.
That aside your main point is that crypto continues to be as relevant in cross jurisdiction payments even after the introduction of a pix like system of payments in each country.
Crypto transaction volumes across all crypto currencies are so low compared to FOREX in any of the worlds currencies (even relatively unused ones - currency speculators still drive transactions even there) that it’s basically irrelevant today in this use case. So your argument becomes it’s irrelevant today and will continue to be tomorrow.
If you’re to express the volume of all crypto transactions, not just those for the purpose of international transaction, just everything in all crypto currencies. The daily volume compared to transactions in all the other non crypto currencies ends up looking like a homeopathic dilution ratio, 0.00000000000000…%
the conversation is supposed to be about cryptocurrency technology,
but you're talking about the gross financial companies that operate in cryptocurrency as if they ARE cryptocurrency.
Not just one feature of its existence.
Common conflation.
My assumption was that it usually comes down to finding someone else with money in both currencies (i.e. a large bank or government) and exchanging one for the other. Of course that's unsatisfying: it's not just turtles all the way down.
Ultimately if I'm running out of, say, USD, and have a lot of CAD, I have to to buy a bunch of something for CAD and sell it in USD. If you wanted a "zero banking" currency transaction I guess the way to do it is to park on the Canadian side of the border, buy imports to the US, walk across to the US, and sell them.
Or maybe there's a magic money shredding / printing machine that I didn't know about. I guess an international treaty could actually authorize such a thing.
The commercial parties sued KNMI, even though they use the public data provided by KNMI. Luckily they lost: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/02/knmi-weathers-legal-app-sto...
And as a bonus, there was some Streisand Effect when this was in the news, and people have been moving to the KNMI app in droves.
This is exactly what I'm talking about and I'm not certain whether you're sarcastic .. Paying $75 on a 25k amount with a transaction time of 24 hours to complete is absolutely insane. You'd have used USDT or USDC or any other stable coin, you would have paid <$1 of fee and got the transaction done in seconds.
Relatedly, most company payments here, including water/electricity/etc bills, are paid using a system called Bankgiro, which is also a private company (and you can pay Bankgiro bills using Swish, of course).
And even the de facto national electronic identity system, BankID, is developed and provided by a private company. It is used to login to your bank as well as most government systems and any company can use it for login (which most Swedish companies do).
So, it differs from the Brazilian model in that all services are provided by private companies, not by the Government. Not sure which is better, to be honest. On the one hand it's hard to trust a Government like the Brazilian one given its history... on the other hand, trusting a private company even for public services seems wild: what if they go bankrupt, get sold to foreign investors, started using shady business practices??
If you drill far enough... well anyway
> I don't know of any machine where dollars go in one side, are destroyed, and euros are created on the other side.
The Treasury is the machine you're looking for. And the wire transfer, SWIFT, usually, is the tool of choice. In a sense, yes dollars are "destroyed" in that they leave that monetary system. Banks like BoA hold a few kind of ledgers with the country's central bank one which gets discounted during the outflow.
So euros are then credited to whatever institution you transferred it to. That country just became that much richer.
This is why places like HSBC, CITI have free transfers for intra-bank but you still pay $15 for the same via wire transfer? Why would you ever want to do that? beats me, but the point is you can and it has a very real affect on the system other than some internal database going +/-.
But in the end, it's the country's central bank credit/debiting any institution and then just... printing? when it wants? but other countries... m1... foreign debt.
so yea, turtles.
Why would this be any different if it was the government running payment services rather than private entities? You haven’t explained why having those middlemen protects you from the same authority that makes up and enforces the rules anyway.
Money is (for the purposes of this conversation) created and guaranteed by the government, and regulated by law, so I think it’s a little weird to not trust the government with my money.
Nuclear Energy is great, but governments and international organizations want to control it because it is too dangerous. So, if we need to use Nuclear Energy, we must play by such rules.
Money is the same thing. Each government wants to control them, regardless of their form.
If someone wants cryptocurrencies to be widely adopted, there is no option but to give them to businesses and governments.
So, crypto would be regulated like usual money. Major blockchains have records for all transactions, which can be tracked and used by businesses and governments to implement more strict control over the whole world. Therefore, the more people use crypto, the less privacy they have.
The Internet and Web were designed to be anonymous, but cookies, IP addresses, data collection, ML/AI, IMEI, MAC, and the control of registration in ISPs and mobile operators have led us to a situation where the government and companies can easily track people. The same situation would be with crypto, which was designed to be anonymous but used in another way.
Don’t lie to yourself, bro.
If we want to have global money and a global payment system, they would be controlled by governments, international organizations, God, Devil, Cthulhu, Spaghetti Monster...
There is no magical solution. We, as a society, need to establish competing social institutions, and try to control them, and try to force them to compete. There is no solver bullet.
Don’t lie to yourself, bro.
There’s plenty of legal ways of exchanging cryptocurrencies for real currencies, shutting those down would be a good start.
I know MobilePay by Danske Bank is one of the most popular payment apps and can be linked directly to a Danish bank account (probably using the Danish "Dankort" payment infrastructure) without Visa/Mastercard involvement.
Most Danish POS and e-commerce solutions support MobilePay and surprisingly the biggest international POS/e-commerce providers also support MobilePay:
https://docs.adyen.com/payment-methods/mobilepay/
https://stripe.com/en-dk/payment-method/mobilepay
https://help.shopify.com/da/manual/payments/shopify-payments...
Our independence from US-based Visa/Mastercard payment infrastructure is enabled by our decades-old "Dankort" digital payment infrastructure that was initially based on magnetic strip cards. Even today most people opt for a so-called "Visa/Dankort" chip card that domestically use the Danish Dankort payment infrastructure but can internationally be used as a Visa.
Who I don't trust completely with my money is banks and financial institutions. That's why I have a government who regulates them. And hey, it has worked where elsewhere it has failed (see 2008 global financial crisis).
This is true, and there's already a proposed law to ban paper money in Brazil.
I cannot fathom the reasoning that would lead you to believe this question is a big gotcha.
The value of any currency comes from the trust in the economy and military of the governments that stand behind it. The USD's value is backed by the economy and military of the United States. The Euro's value is backed by the economy and military of the Eurozone countries. If you live in the US and the economy collapses to the point the USD loses its value, the value of the USD will be your least concern - same if the US were invaded by a hostile military force and unable to defend itself.
Your currency is literally backed by your country. Your country issues the currency and your country sets the rules for how much additional currency banks can conjure into existence. Whether you use that currency in cash, bank transactions or payment systems doesn't affect that point. Cash is the only one of the three that's meaningfully different in that it allows the physical transfer of money without a "paper trail" because you can exchange it for goods and services directly (which doesn't apply to e.g. handing over keys to crypto wallets as part of a transaction because you can't move the balance off the wallet without leaving a digital trail).
There is no inherent value in cryptocurrencies just as there is no inherent value in state-backed currencies. The value of cryptocurrencies primarily hinges on their use as a speculative investment - even stocks or futures have a more concrete value basis (representing ownership of parts of a company and future ownership of trade goods respectively). This means its value is not tied to the performance or power of any one state but it also makes the value much more volatile and unreliable and much easier to manipulate.
Cryptocurrencies also stil rely on trust: for most cryptocurrencies you have to trust the people who issued it (and in some cases the underlying code), given how many have suffered from "rug pulls" and pump-and-dump schemes before. For currencies like BTC you also have to trust that no single actor can be able to perform a 51% attack. For currencies like ETH, you have to trust the smart contracts that might be involved (and have been exploited/abused before). Most people also rely on third party services to actually trade crypto currencies, so they need to trust those as well and there have been plenty of scams involving them even where they didn't turn out to be unreliable outright.
All currency is vulnerable to manipulation by agents with control over disproportionate amounts of it - billionaires, megacorps, banks, states using it as a reserve currency, etc. But non-cypto currencies suppress some of that control with their own and they have a symbiotic relationship with their currencies (i.e. if the USD does badly, that affects the US economy, which affects the US government budget, which affects its ability to maintain its institutitions including the military).
So the question then is not how much do you trust your government but do you trust your government more than the wealthiest other actors (domestic and foreign) that would exercise influence over the currency in its absence. Given that the state is not only the only thing enforcing the idea of property rights but also able to take everything away (including your physical freedom and life) from anyone who lives in its sphere of direct influence, even if you distrust your government more it's a moot point unless you also have the ability to flee it at a moment's notice if necessary - and I'd wager that's not the case for the overwhelming majority of people.
You say we may end up with systems like Pix for each country/union - sure but there's no reason there can't be interoperability between them the way there is with SWIFT transactions. At the moment Brazil seems to offer Pix International and Pix Roaming to open the system up to tourists and Brazilians travelling abroad but there's no reason similar systems can't develop a standard for direct compatibility without having to require support by each foreign bank or POS system.
I guess that alternative scenario sounds more dystopian the more wealth you have - but with enough wealth you can also imagine having a private security force providing that threat of violence to keep the community in check.
The reason? Why is a third world, poor country like Brazil so advanced on finance? While there's no single reason myself and most of the execs I've worked with tend to believe in two:
- Fraud, which is rampant in Brazil, incentivizes banks to invest a lot into modernizing their systems
- Complex financial rules, imposed by our government, required a lot of investment in systems as well
These all come from the 80s, so by now we have modern, fully digital systems in all our financial institutions, so things like pix and open finance can be easily implemented.
Each transaction is somehow only known by sender and receiver
It might as well be illegal today.
Art. 16 da Lei nº 14.063, de 23/09/2021: estabelece que os sistemas de informação e de comunicação desenvolvidos exclusivamente pela administração pública são regidos por licença de código aberto, permitida a sua utilização, cópia, alteração e distribuição sem restrições por todos os órgãos e entidades públicos.[0]
Art. 16 of Law No. 14,063, of 09/23/2021: establishes that information and communication systems developed exclusively by the public administration are governed by an open source license, allowing their use, copying, alteration and distribution without restrictions by all public bodies and entities.[0]
[0]https://www.gov.br/governodigital/pt-br/plataformas-e-servic...
So, lets open up its code!
So are you saying there's an procedure where the US treasury takes USD out of circulation, and the ECB introduces the equivalent in Euro, according to some official exchange rate? How do they set the exchange rate?
But it seems to me like banks don't really want to make bank transfers more comfortable for small transactions.
It's also unsurprising to see outlets like The Economist somewhat criticise this, along with fintech corporations, because the government is offering a free and high quality alternative to something that companies would have done exactly the same but for money.
The transaction cost compared to most domestic systems is absurdly high.
Site from 4 years ago "The cheap, fast way to send money abroad" https://web.archive.org/web/20210305145221/https://wise.com/
vs now "Send money globally for less" wise.com
That's why our railways are falling apart and why we have 2500 pharmacies but people up north have to travel to the town 100k away to get meds.
I wish the government that we elect every 4 years with public voting and kindergarten bartering could take ownership of things that are essential to life in Sweden, but nop it's all privatized so the companies can optimize profits by removing utility (BankID seems to be an exception here where the incentives align between companies and citizens).
Scanning a PIX QR code with your camera will just result in text, not a payable URL. You have to scan it in your online banking app for it to be processed as something.
Your banking app will load the details about the payment and you'll see the recipient details before performing the payment.
Even with regular barcode payments, these barcodes are registered with the bank before it's a valid barcode. A lookup is done, if it exists the recipient details are displayed, often the amount, and verifications that it has not expired. (Do not receive after date X)
Brazil has a pretty decent banking system, though the worst online-banking experience I've ever had. (Slowly improving)
Like if you want to bet on "Elon out of Trump administration before July?" you kind of have to go to polymarket or similar. (current price 41c)
In my country, we have a similar system, and before my bank sends me a push notification about the outgoing transfer, the push notification for incoming transfer pops up for most of the time. The delay between push notifications rarely goes above 2 seconds.
Ours has an upper limit to prevent abuse of the system, but you can't beat instant, actually.
I like the idea of my money being my money and not just mine as long as my government isn't annoyed with me. I don't much care if other people are afraid of it. That's a great thing about crypto. You are free not to participate, unlike the corpo-fiat systems.
The classic one is some FOSS people inventing a protocol where servers can talk to clients, and declaring a problem solved, when in actual fact, most people don't have a server. Mastodon is this, but so is XMPP.
HTTP took off because there were servers you could fetch things from with HTTP, not because it theoretically allowed you to fetch things from servers.
Paper euros aren't cool because I can "have money". They're cool because I can go to the grocery store and trade them for something to eat. My bank card isn't cool because I can "have money". It's cool because I can go and swipe it and not have to count paper euros. If you want cryptocurrency to be cool, you're going to have to get it integrated into grocery stores, which is, of course, impossible because it can only process 7 transactions per second. You also need a way to convert my paychecks into cryptocurrency, but this is basically solved with crypto exchanges now.
But mostly, it's the light-green-on-dark-green text which I dislike, and I _think_ they dialed down its usage compared to e.g. the brand announcement[0] and how the blog looks[1] compared to the main site. Then again, de gustibus.
[0] https://wise.com/community/en/brand-new-look [1] https://wise.com/gb/blog/welcoming-libby-to-the-board
Or you do it like we do here in Germany and take the dumbest route you can imagine.
We had a very well working publicly funded weather app from DWD (Deutscher Wetter Dienst). The primarily purpose of this app was to warn from extreme weather conditions, but it also included an ad free (because publicly funded) and rather accurate forecast.
Then a private entity sued claiming that the DWD app also providing weather information is unfair competition for private competitors. The won in court and now the publicly funded DWD app has a paywall for a previously free feature.
> but you're talking about the gross financial companies that operate in cryptocurrency as if they ARE cryptocurrency.
That's because the middlemen are inevitable and they work the way they do for a reason—governments won't let them work any other way.
Cryptocurrency is a technological solution for a human problem, and you can't analyze the impact of the technology divorced from the human reality without losing so much resolution as to make your analysis meaningless.
Yes if you are poor as dirt and can just take your life savings of <$10k (probably 99% of humanity) on an airplane if you need to use it in another country, you can do so no problem and you do not care, the idea of a crypto OTC desk likely does not even occur to you. It is still solving the same problem, but by being small enough that no one cares.
The data pretty well speaks for itself. Humanity with money cares a lot about escaping capital controls. This is inviolable, the more the banking system handicaps itself the more capital flows into less regulated products.
Crypto is only worth something because you can convert it to fiat and with that fiat can sign fiat denominated contracts that are enforced by the government.
Your government already has a monopoly on violence and owns your whole life.
You mischaracterized that.
> You have bizarre logic here. For example, in a topic discussed about GPUs, someone would say that it's not possible to run databases on GPUs, so GPUs don't have any chance of succeeding.
He's saying it wont get adopted worldwide. Not that it wont succeed (which is a very ambiguous metric).
the best source I could find is this: https://finsidersbrasil.com.br/
This isnt a take down of Pix. Sounds excellent and should be replicated in other countries. Lets just not pretend its a viable solution for tourists.
And if you start your own community, people come out of the woodwork early on or after any AMA session
Outside of that there are job boards and word of mouth
>How much do you trust your government with your money?
Well I'm in Canada, I would trust the govt and the banks with my money before I trust anyone else (yes yes, trucker protest bullshit still didn't shake my confidence)
Which is ultimately the problem. The govt and well regulated banks are the only ones you should be able to trust, but in many case you can't trust governments or their ability to regulate things.
From my reading, the system seems like it's intended to be used with a connected device and scanned/copypasted rather than typed or read over the phone.
Across the whole EU, there's already a pretty low limit on card transactions and a deadline of later this year for banks to implement SEPA instant transfers.
Technologists repeatedly get this wrong. The best money system is the one that lets me buy groceries in exchange for working, not the one that's cryptographically unbreakable. Unless I'm running an illegal internet-based drug empire, in which case, the ones that aren't cryptographically unbreakable are disqualified, since I'd need the government to not be able to trace the money flow in my illegal drug empire. But even real illegal drug empires that are not internet-based mostly use government-issued currency, with measures taken to hinder tracing!
as in you can't get your card cloned and then a bunch of transactions show up.
mmh, not really - banks who are connected to the Euro-Zone can use it, but it has not a "beyond-EU"-ambition.
TIPS is just one of the two clearing-mechanisms, there is also RT1 (which is operated by a private entity and launchend long before TIPS came into place, TIPS is operated by each countries national bank in coop with ECB), since some time, there is interoperability, so you can transact from TIPS-connected entities to RT1-connected entities; RT1 is much more expensive than TIPS
You can say several bad things about Brazil, but it being poor is not one of them.
> The reason?
A friend that worked in banks in Brazil and Canada thinks that it may be because Brazilian banks went digital later, so it was easier to implement more modern features.
This is, banks that went digital earlier stuck with older technologies because them just worked.
In the opposite way: Japan. It was a futuristic country in the past but now they still use fax and recently abandoned floppy disks
I was a "digital nomad" before that was even a term.
I've done "work from home" in Japan, China, Macau, South Korea, Belgium, and at least ten American cities. Even way back when we did it with payphones, Telex and fax machines.
Get off my lawn.
in this case, you invest in building out a compliant and easy money transfer service. in other cases, you invest in a toll road, etc. etc.
the whole point of investment is it is a win-win
Go ask chatgpt, it will explain it quite well.
Soviet union was fine too if you were an apparatchik…
It should be satisfying in the following sense - the financial system is nowhere near as complicated as it seems. There is no magic. If you find yourself feeling like there is some magic somewhere, just ask another question because there is likely just a word or a layer of indirection that is making something quite simple seem mysterious.
In practice, it is software consulting companies that are doing all of the heavy lifting while the federal workers largely sit back and collect their paycheck - and talented operators are extremely rare there as well.
Looking forward to chatting.
Bitcoin can never be a Pix replacement. It's too damn slow, and others have pointed out, having to manage the entire transaction history is just stupid. (A end customer might not have to do serious book keeping on transaction history, but companies would.)
Pix works great for Brazil. That's what it was intended to do. And that's what it does. Case-closed.
[0] https://dci.mit.edu/ [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aepr.12464
Without physical cash, your finances are one hundred percent controlled by the government. Sure, it's convenient, but you pay for that convenience with your freedom.
This is a country with obscenely high interest rates, currently at over 14% per year. It's just ridiculous. And inflation is still hovering between 4% to 5% per year, just under pandemic levels. The solution is for the government to stop spending money. They don't want to do that, they want to increase taxes instead. As a result, we're at record breaking taxation levels, last year Brazil achieved its highest tax revenue since 1995.
The current administration spent the last two years crying about the central bank's high interest rates. I can't even fathom what'd happen to this country if they got what they wanted. Mercifully, central bank has some degree of autonomy from their stupidity. After a couple years they get to appoint the head of the central bank. It turned out even their own guy wasn't stupid enough to lower the rates.
I think the only reason they haven't taxed Pix yet is the fact Pix is too popular already. I have no doubt they're still gonna manage to increase revenue by cross referencing Pix data for tax purposes.
There was a fun period where the brazilian government mandated the use of free and open source software in its computers. I remember lots of people who complained about the quality of OpenOffice. Microsoft managed to put an end to that at some point. After former president Dilma's impeachment, I think.
And there will never be one. Not too long ago I actually gave this a try. Tried to coordinate with my bank's managers and everything. I didn't even intend to publish the result, I just didn't want to use the bank's shitty apps anymore. Turns out that in order to touch the banking system you need an actual company with special permission from the central bank.
> Something as common as the dominant payment system should not depend on proprietary software.
Cryptocurrency is the only way to make that a reality. The sooner people accept this, the better.
It will. Every single Pix transaction is reported to the tax authorities. It's only a matter of time.
https://www.china-briefing.com/news/wechat-enables-foreigner...
You'll need to provide more constructive feedback. Or are you suggesting that it's not "destroyed" and that the origin country can freely transfer money without discounting its books?
Really, it's bad form to comment on something technical where you are just miles out of your depth.
TIPS represented more than 50% of all TARGET number of payments at the end of 2024: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/payment_statistics/large_val...
Beyond TARGET, ECB noted repeatedly the reliance on international card schemes for electronic payments and card transactions in the EU. The latest report restating that accounted for approximately 61% of euro area card transactions in 2022: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2025/html/ecb.pr2502...
Both are "profitable", as there is more money in the end, but governments are eating real costs to manage the physical bills.
As far as I know, AccuWeather is the main beneficiary. You can easily find reliable sources about it.
The cause is that NOAA publishes all weather data, calculated models (global coverage), meteostations data (global coverage), and weather radars to the public for free (US only, maybe also Canada, I don't remember). Therefore, many weather companies use such data to do their business and compete directly with AccuWeather. They don't like this.
On the other hand, state weather agencies that calculate global models in many countries don't provide such data for free. Therefore, startups and small companies who work in weather and climate fields use NOAA data and directly compete with AccuWeather or don't pay them for data access.
Companies whose primary business is weather apps are small, and such areas are highly competitive.
And yes, of course there are limits on what you can do as a visitor, but for normal touristy stuff it's quite sufficient.
But yeah, it's mostly just market forces that keep things stabilized, it seems.
[1]: https://www.cfr.org/tracker/central-bank-currency-swaps-trac...
I support cash and gold as well.
The main trick that folks get hung up on (and, you might be too) is that most "money" is just an IOU from a bank. We've just created a sophisticated way to trade the IOUs and call it "money".
It's not inconceivable (nor magical in any way) to imagine treaties that would allow an actual conversion from one currency to another, where USD go in one side and Euro come out the other. Situations like this have existed in the past: currencies have been converted when, for example, the former currencies in the Eurozone were converted to Euros.
No such situations exist right now: entities just hold multiple currencies and exchange them for you.
Your mental model is falling down around the definition of "currency", "money" etc. It isn't what you imagine it is. We just have a system for trading bank receivables and call it "money".
I think the best way to explain it is an example.
My contact needs to get money to his family across the world. I happen to have a cousin that I love and trust who lives there and runs a gas station. My contact gives me 10k USD + a fee and then I call my cousin and tell him to give 10k to the contact's family member if they give the right password. At the end of the year, I meet up with my cousin and I bring him some gold or other goods depending on what our deficits are to each other.
Customers and merchants generate a keypair and CSR. The CSR by design contains no personal information. You submit the public key/CSR and seperate identifying information to a KYC authority.
The government generates a signed certificate the bank can use to open an account, and the customer or merchant signs their transaction requests using their private key to associate them with the account.
The bank has a paper trail showing KYC was performed, but does not have any personal information about the participants, almost akin to the old "numbered Swiss account" cliche.
Ideally, the KYC authority deletes the personal data after issuing certificates, but I'd expect it would be more "information can be released under court order" or "revocation policy blah blah blah".
That's the level of tradeoff I'd expect is politically viable. Bank of America doesn't know you're buying hentai, but if it turns out the 1000-year-old character is actually 12, a court can lift the veil.
It took some prompting to get it to say "It's really not rocket science." though.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67fa2c5f-d940-800a-bdad-b723e763e0...
But for the record Bitcoin and it's cousins are the exact definition of free and open source software as it is both free and open source. Just because you don't like it doesn't change the facts.