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.

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.

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-...

Technically a pre-paid option should be possible, but I could not find anything about something in that vein.

Watching the Indian and Brazillian governements solve this problem by by building the payment networks themselves and removing the profit incentive has felt vindicating.

The bad thing is that Pix shows it will work for many, many years.

Until this line I forgot crypto was even competing!

Pix can't facilitate cross-border micro payments.

They protect against tracking and provide anonimity. That might be valuable.

...except for inflation.

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

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)

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’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.

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.

Even a small country like Denmark has multiple software and finance companies doing apps and software in the digital payments and banking field.

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.

Tangentially related, I've heard talk of EU alternative to VISA and Mastercard, which I also believe is the right direction.

You wouldn’t want a foreign company with billions of dollars in their war chest in charge of your countries payment system.

The president of the Brazilian Central Bank is accountable. Zuckaberg isn't.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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.

2. Yes, it's quite easy

Wasn't the Fed going to launch their own take on UPI with FedNow?

But I think adoption is slow because everyone in the EU already has credit cards and fees are not paid by consumers.

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t know why cashapp and Venmo took off but Zelle stayed unknown

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.

You do not "put your money into Pix", your money is in your bank account. Pix is just a bank transfer mechanism; if you have a Brazilian bank account, you can send and receive through Pix.

And you keep repeating these old-fashioned stereotypes?