Re:Zcash begins
by eloff on Friday October 28, 2016 @03:03PM
(#12819550)
A lot of the replies here demonstrate a significant amount of ignorance about just how hard it is to pay for things outside of the US. It's not too bad in Canada and Europe, but once you have an address and credit card in a small developing nation, you have substantially limited payment options. With my Panama credit card (which is a premium card) I can't buy from most places outside of Amazon.com. PayPal fortunately accepts my card, so I shop anywhere PayPal is accepted online.
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Interesting. I usually found the reverse to be true - i.e. my Russian credit cards worked just fine in New Zealand, Canada and US, but my Canadian and US cards are usually rejected by Russian online stores.
In person the card works just fine, but online retailers won't accept it.
Panama is a bit of a special case as it's considered to be a fiscal paradise by most countries. I have a card from Malaysia (which is a developing nation albeit relatively rich compared to its neighbours) and I can use it pretty much anywhere.
The only issue I really sometimes have is that my bank will sometimes block transactions which they find suspicious and call me to confirm that it was me who did the transaction. That card does support 3d secure though so usually if the merchant supports 3d secure then the card works perfectly and has no issues.
I think it has less to do with fiscal paradise, since that's probably not overly correlated with fraud, but rather the fact that it's a country of 3.5 million people. That means there's little to no incentive to support transactions from Panama - so it tends to be blocked by default along with most other countries you're not likely to get sales from.