Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

I'm a Brazilian. Everything here can be paid through pix. It's very convenient, fast reliable and, for a country like ours where walking on the streets with money is a risk, safe.

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.

> Something as common as the dominant payment system should not depend on proprietary software.

Name one dominant payment system worldwide that doesn't? Banks are proprietary, credit cards are proprietary, paypal, crypto is all proprietary.

Nearly all of cryptocurrency is fully open source and properly FOSS

> crypto is all proprietary

What?

You mention crypto; it's not a dominant payment system, but nor is it proprietary; there are open source wallets and the blockchains are open source.

I think a steelmanned version of their comment is that crypto apps are proprietary, which I think is mostly true. There are open source apps, but most of the big ones are all proprietary.

Good were the days when you only could get robbed by what you had in your pockets.

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.

Do you use/recommend any FOSS payment system?

I could not find any VISA foss software.

if there is any payment system that MAY be FOSS in the future, it is PIX. Not apple wallet.

I still don't really get this. Do you mean that frent-ends have proprietary code?

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on-chain can be slightly inscrutable in their bytecode format, but it's pretty uncommon for smart contracts to not be published with source code and a verifiable build.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...

Apps as in applications, contracts are not apps.

Contactless pix will (has? It’s been a bit since I had to worry about payment rails) allow pix integration with Apple Wallet.

I interpreted it as: crypto is proprietary in that it is bespoke. Crypto prior to ethereum didn't even have a concept of compatibility. Forks of existing crypto could be considered proprietary with respect to each other and with respect to the original project being forked. The need for bridging to other chains/coins as well as the need for on/off-ramps also speaks to the somewhat-proprietary nature of modern cryptocurrencies.

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.

> there's no FLOSS app (AFAIK) to use it.

Does this mean that you also don't use your bank Android/iPhone APP? So your entire financial life is handled via a browser?

The money is, of course, not open source, so there will never be any FLOSS app for it.

Sorry, I should've been way more clear. But this is what I was getting at. If the average person wants to buy or trade in crypto, they don't reach for an open source solution, they'll use a proprietary service. I know that's built ontop of a lot of great open source tech, but the final 'app' people interact with isn't open. The fact that pix doesn't have an open source app just strikes me as a weird reason not to use it.

> Do you mean that front-ends have proprietary code?

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.

> There's only one reason I don't use it: there's no FLOSS app (AFAIK) to use it.

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.