Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

Well I'm thanking the government for saving us from yet another Facebook monopoly thorough first mover advantage and network effects.

It's an interesting topic for study. Being the first to launch wasn't the only factor, but certainly an important one - WhatsApp Pay is available today, but it's nowhere near as popular as Pix. That's why I mentioned it. With that being said, I don't think people need "saving" from choosing to use a service. It's not certain that WhatsApp Pay would really take off as much as Pix did. I also don't think one should be thankful for having one monopoly replaced by another (in the sense of market dominance, you can still use alternative payment methods). Imagine instead of WhatsApp Pay it was WhatsApp itself. Meta is no saint, but at least messages are E2E encrypted. How would GovApp look like? As mentioned in the article, Pix has every transaction go directly through the central bank, as opposed to going through commercial banks like traditional payment methods. It may provide great usability, but also concentrates power and risk, as written in The Economist. So far there is no indication this power has been used in any malicious way, or that any significant breach occurred, but the infrastructure for that is there, and governments change. That should at least be in one's mind, if one values some kind of personal financial freedom.

Good to hear your words loyalty and patriotism, dear citizen! I will contact your local commissar and make sure he increases your social credit score by 5 points.

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.

Thanks, maybe someday I will finally be promoted to Internet Shill First Class.

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.

it's kinda funny seeing us-american always baffled that we have a somewhat functional democracy in contrast to their corporatocracy

Visa and Mastercard are agents for the customer, who benefits greatly from instant and convenient transactions, fraud protection, currency conversion, and credit lines. The merchant pays them for access to these customers, and I have to say that the fees are small for what an amazing service these networks provide. I don't think neither their fees nor their profits are outrageous.

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.

Literally 1984. Literally!

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