I have a similar reaction.

If you want to go all the way into the consumer value matrix - Has anyone on HN ever had much a 2nd thought about whether or not their card would 'just work' out in the world?

I used to work in the actual room where acquirer links were monitored in real time 24/7/365. At least 8 people were in that room at any given time. I've never worked in nuclear power but I imagine you could draw some parallels.

This kind of reliability is not cheap or easy to come by. There isn't a clever technical trick you can employ to realize it. The only way to achieve the kinds of reliability we have in the world today still requires lots of human involvement throughout.

Does anyone dream of having a google-style support experience next time they are standing in line at the grocery store? This is basically what you are demanding when you say you want zero % fees on all transactions.

The history of payments and banking is amazing.

It’s always been a hard problem to solve, and the bankers who solved it always got paid handsomely for enabling commerce.

In the old days everyone bartered. Then came shells. Then precious metals. The gold had to be literally shipped around. Everyone from the Roman to the British empire had to physically ship chests of gold to it’s soldiers. Cross border commerce was absolutely fraught with risk. Piracy and shipwrecks galore.

Then the Rothschilds opened the first international bank, dramatically cutting the difficulty and expense of international trade.

We got cheques, paper money, and the credit card control room you worked in.

At every step, it got faster, cheaper, safer, more ephemeral. Trade increased dramatically. It’s amazing! The much-maligned banking sector is really a triumph of capitalism.

In the old days, even with the existence of precious metals and coin-based currency, a more community driven "help your neighbor" system thrived, moreso than a tit-for-tat system of exchange prevalent today or even theorized in the barter system.

> The much-maligned banking sector is really a triumph of capitalism.

Yes, the triumph of "what's in it for me".

You should indeed ask yourself that very question: what's in it for me?

Do you want to send little bits of gold and silver all around the world, or would you prefer modern banking? The choice is yours, pick the one that's best for you!

Another innovation is JPM coin, which is technically a cryptocurrency, and they're using that to power their internal international money movement systems.

Well there’s the FedNow Service which will introduce instant payments. Should eliminate the need for parasitic credit card processing networks.

A good “FedNow” or instant payment provider can easily disrupt the debit and credit card processing companies. At most, businesses charged 5-10 cents per transaction.

No more dealing with credit card network fees. Chargeback fees. Exchange fees. Issuing bank fees. Premium card fees. Just a simple 5-10 cent per transaction. Only need a US bank account.

I live in the UK, where we've had instant, free, interbank payments for the last few years (we've had free interbank payments for > 10 years, but the instant part came in a few years ago as part of the Faster Payments scheme).

Spoiler alert: it has not eliminated the need for credit cards. The credit card system has a lot of flexibility and integrations to make for a superior user experience in a number of situations. For example, a lot of banks let you create virtual cards for specific purposes (eg: I have one for all my online subscriptions, and another for merchants I've not dealt with before). Not to mention Apple/Google Pay and their integration into basically every single online payments platform.

Great, so it only works in a single country. Stripe supports much more countries and payment rails than just US credit cards.

You chose the most expensive "routing", otherwise you would only have spent cents to send any amount.

Knowing that is part of “figuring it out”. A lot of people wouldn’t expect something that harsh to be possible and/or don’t keep up with news about gas fees. A mistake that will never be repeated but a mistake most of us have done the first time.

The first and last time I'll ever pay "gas fees". I can wire arbitrary amounts around the world for a fraction of that gas fee with the full backing of the global banking system.