Something like Pix is a great blueprint for the future imo.

I don’t want international private companies controlling payments, better have my own elected government manage it.

It goes both ways: What if the ONLY payment method was the one approved by your "elected" government. A balance where they can all exist is the best, and most difficult decision.

Currency is already managed by the elected government, and every democracy in the world traces electronic transactions. Some (like Italy) forbid cash payments in large sums altogether. So what's the boogieman here?

The boogyman is just what you described, and every democracy in the world absolutely does not trace electronic transactions.

Some have a more hands off approach, including size of transactions and flagged behaviour as indicators of when payment processors must report to the government.

The Goverment should absolutely have no idea who spends what, where. Warrants and court orders, check values should be required before anyone can know. The potential to suppress political opponents, to squelch legitimate protest, to interfere with elections, is too dangerous.

Simply because some countries, like the US after 9/11, decided to give up this aspect of a free people, does not make it right.

They do trace and log them, though.

They do not. They have to get a warrant to get such logs from a bank.

What makes you believe that this is true?

AFAIK, in India, payments more than Rs. 50k is tracked.

In anycase, the governments have the capability, what remains is just the intend. And we see how intends could change at the whim of a leader.

Governments have a monopoly on violence and thus technically the ability to do whatever they want. But it matters how theoretical that ability is and how publicly apparent misuse of the ability will be. Having all transactions flow through the government makes abuse both trivial and invisible to the public.

If I have the choice of being tracked by my government or a private profit driven company I’ll choose the former any day.

The company will sell all data to my government anyway if prompted.

Of course no tracking at all is the best option and I’m a huge proponent of cash - but it’s not always practical.

Yes, and this is a bad thing, and free societies are impossible without the possibility of payments that the government doesn’t want you to be able to make.

Cryptocurrency solves that problem well, which is why governments have moved hard to effectively nerf it everywhere.

> the possibility of payments that the government doesn’t want you to be able to make

The idea that visa and mastercard provide these ...

Visa and Mastercard don't, but right now cash more or less does. If the state has a monopoly on digital payments, and can thus mass surveil all digital payments without any scrutiny, the state has a huge incentive to disincentivize or bar the use of cash. Then all it takes is a bad actor to come into power and abuse the system.

No more so than with visa or mastercard, who already hand over data whenever, and hand it over to a foreign government on demand too.

This fear of government services is toxic americanism.

No, the previous commenter is absolutely correct that cash transactions offer decentralization and anonymity far greater than Visa or MasterCard.

Not relevant to the point I was making at all - the state running digital payments is no more an incentive to stop cash payments than Visa/MC.

User data is available from either and in the case of Visa/MC it also likely leaks overseas.

> Not relevant to the point I was making at all - the state running digital payments is no more an incentive to stop cash payments than Visa/MC.

Yes, it is. The state acting as a direct intermediary for all transactions creates new mechanisms of both mass surveillance and economic control that do not exist in the status quo where the state functions merely as the issuer of cash.

When private businesses create digital transaction systems that augment the cash economy, the state itself does not have direct access to or control over the transactions that flow through those systems, and must work within legal strictures to interact with the organizations managing them.

> User data is available from either and in the case of Visa/MC it also likely leaks overseas.

Perhaps, but the legal implications between the state obtaining access to illicitly leaked data and the state itself being the originator of that data are drastically different.

Currency is a barriers bond that affords a degree of decentralisation-in-operation and use that isn't afforded by digital payments, even crypto for practical purposes.

bearers* bond. Too late to edit.

The Italian government has no power over foreign cards, and will be careful to not hinder those transactions lest they want to lose their tourism income.

When it comes down to it they do have power over the use of foreign cards in their jurisdiction. But the further indirection from the government does matter and makes abuse harder.

Realistically the most they can do is exercise power over cards issued by Italian banks. They can't do anything about cards belonging to Italians, which have been issued by foreign banks, unless they ban all foreign cards. In which case they will lose all tourism and destroy their country completely.

> approved by your elected government.

Fixed it for you. You had left some extraneous quotation marks there.

Either way, while governments should not get free pass and should be scrutinized by its citizens, we definitely should not allow corporations with ties to hostile governments (such as the case of Visa and Mastercard) any oversight of payment infrastructure.

The government can already order VISA to not accept your payment and/or just make it too cost-prohibitive. Without any real recourse from your side.

Direct government services typically have a universal mandate. The government won't be able to stop doing business with you.

> What if the ONLY payment method was the one approved by your "elected" government.

Yeah, what if?

You didn't provide any argument, didn't point to any real problem. You just hinted at a "terrible bad thing". Would we have monsters under our beds or bad guys in corners to ambush us?

This sounds like VISA/Mastercad/Apple Pay playing FUD[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt

You realize you're arguing for a monopoly, right? One where competition is not only non-existent but also illegal, and which has complete control over how you're allowed to spend your money.

I think arguing "but it's a democratic monopoly" is little comfort in this situation. Maybe you trust your government not to ever be incompetent or to use the powers granted by this monopoly in a way you disapprove of. Maybe in the short term you'd even be right to do so. But I think history has proven that over the long term that's a very foolish assumption to make.

Which is completely irrelevant because as the government of the country they have the power to make laws, now and in the future which compel private entities to perform actions like AML (anti money laundering) and KYC (know your customers).

The end result is private entities taking money out of the system at some stage, and it doesn't shield you in any way from government incompetence or malice.

Suppose you have an actually decentralized payment system, like cash, or any digital system that preserves the same properties whether or not it involves a blockchain.

An example of one that doesn't would be a global decentralized protocol for transferring money. You're standing in a coffee shop in LA and want to pay for a coffee so you tell your bank to transfer $5 to their bank. It works the same if your bank is in Brazil and their bank is in Switzerland as if both banks are in Nebraska, involves no intermediary other than each party's bank, and their bank shows them the transfer immediately so they know to give you the coffee.

Then the panzers roll into Washington and der Führer wants to reintroduce financial surveillance to make sure nobody is covertly buying a computer that doesn't censor the internet. Obviously they can force the bank in Nebraska to inform on the dissidents, but your bank is in Brazil and the seller's bank is in Switzerland.

Unless the system allowing that is dismantled ahead of time so the dystopia can be switched on overnight instead of needing years to erode entrenched decentralized infrastructure.

"They could theoretically seize control of everything anyway, so we should just let them seize control of everything now without a fight" doesn't seem like a great argument to me.

Things like the constitution, separation of powers, checks and balances, and decentralized control of communication and commerce serve as bulwarks against tyranny. That they all could be dismantled in the future is not an argument against doing our best to preserve them now. Tyranny is not a binary state, it's a gradient with many steps along the path thereto.

(Also, "taking money out of the system" is not optional; payment systems cost money to maintain whether it's done by a private entity or by government.)

The indirection is a shield.

> The end result is private entities taking money out of the system at some stage,

How is it possible to take money out of the system? Those private organizations are just participants in the commercial economy, right?

In my country they have to make laws to FORCE shops and restaurants to accept cash. Because it is a damn hassle.

You go far enough on fiscal tracking and you just wind up back where we've always been: barter. All currency is as useful as the regime backing it, and when that regime falls, barter always comes back in. Everything else is just rent seeking scaffolding to reduce barter friction (cash let's me store all the value I've created, but so could gold bars, or bitcoin, or vodka).

This is to say: All currency is about control and convenience (you trade "invisible transaction" for "easily able to resolve payment") because those in power want to know/control the money and everyone else wants convenience.

> You realize you're arguing for a monopoly, right?

Right! Like all the other monopolies that governments already have: public security (police and courts of law), external security (armed forces), public healthcare in many civilized countries, inspection of health regulations and consumer safety, monetary policy, etc.

> you trust your government not to ever be incompetent

Oh, I don't. But Apple, Visa, Mastercard and Google Pay aren't very "competent" either.

> history has proven that over the long term

History has proven that privatization of many of government monopolies are disastrous: Roman generals making private armies and destroying the Republic, abuse of forced labor from inmates in private prisons, exorbitant fees from payment providers (Visa, Mastercard), food dangerous for public consumption because the governments didn't inspect them, etc.

> But Apple, Visa, Mastercard and Google Pay aren't very "competent" either.

The article doesn't say and I know nothing about India. I could guess consumers are oaying using their smartphones. So Google/Apple duopoly are still the gatekeepers to use UPI making huge profits. Of course using one of the American backends would make their control and profits orders of magnitudes bigger.

> Like all the other monopolies that governments already have

Your examples are things that aren't inherently monopolies and are significantly worse if you try to make them such. It's better to give people the right to self-defense than to put them in jail for violating a "public security" monopoly for not allowing someone else to kill them when there were no police around. It's cruel to prohibit someone from paying for their own healthcare in cases when the procedure exists but the public system won't spend the money. What argument could you even make for prohibiting private inspections of products and services the likes of Consumer Reports?

The things that are better as a monopoly are so rare that they plausibly don't exist.

You're motte-and-baileying here. Arguing that there are natural/desirable monopolies for government to possess in certain high-risk cases does not automatically translate into an argument that it's desirable for governments to have monopolies in every case imaginable. As a rule of thumb, it's best to avoid monopolies wherever possible, and rely on government solving complex coordination problems only as a last resort.

Pointing out that it's reasonable for governments to suppress private armies maurauding around and having wars with each other does not in any way sustain the argument that it's reasonable to allow governments to act as a forced intermediary in everyone's commercial transactions.

Payment rails are a natural monopoly so yeah I’m good with the gov owning it and as the article says, everyone is free to compete with the services they offer.

I'd have a very hard time spending other currencies than CAD to pay my bills.

The alternatives still exist, there is just less and less reason to use them because they charge extra fees.

I encourage you to loudly champion such a model in your nation state to whomever is in power and will listen.

I don't want corporations controlling payments, but I don't want my government controlling payments either.

What I actually wanted was for the cryptocurrency dream to become reality, but it turned into stocks instead.

Your government already controls your currency and thereby your assets, why would you die on the this particular hill of how you can transact this government-created currency? For free as opposed to for a fee no less? You don't believe transaction data isn't shared (sold) by commercial parties do you?

> I don’t want international private companies controlling payments, better have my own elected government manage it.

The ideal of course is decentralized payment systems with no middlemen, but if there are going to be middlemen, a competitive marketplace of middlemen driven primary by predictable financial incentives is vastly less scary than monopolization by power-centralizing political institutions.

The interesting thing is that Visa's payment rails are cheaper than Pix. Pix charges businesses 0.22% to 0.33% while the Visa network rate is only 0.10% to 0.15% per transaction.

The main thing that makes card transactions more expensive is the merchant bank assuming chargeback risk, but that's because card payments are an entirely different transaction type. Pix is digital cash. You typically cannot get refunded for any reason. Cards are not digital cash. You can get refunded for fraud and unauthorized transactions.

Visa debit, maybe, but they're way higher for Visa credit.

> The interesting thing is that Visa's payment rails are cheaper than Pix. Pix charges businesses 0.22% to 0.33% while the Visa network rate is only 0.10% to 0.15% per transaction.

This is not factually accurate. Pix also has fraud controls built into the platform, and does fine doing far more volume than credit card rails in Brazil. It is an objective success, having avoided US financial service firms from skimming hundreds of basis points of total economic activity out of the Brazilian economy.

Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48052371 - May 2026 (383 comments)

Brazil's Pix ‘much cheaper' than card payments, paper by central bank economists shows - https://www.reuters.com/article/business/brazils-pix-much-ch... - March 23rd, 2022 ("Brazil’s Pix retail instant payment system is “much cheaper” than card payments for merchants, according to a paper published Wednesday by the umbrella body of the world’s central banks, highlighting its growth potential for businesses after its vertiginous rise among individuals. The paper, which was co-authored by economists at the Brazilian central bank for the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), says Pix costs an average of 0.22% of a transaction’s value for merchants, whereas debit cards cost slightly above 1% and credit cards reach 2.2% in Brazil.")

Payment technology complementarities and their consequences on the banking sector: evidence from Brazil’s Pix - https://www.bis.org/publ/bppdf/bispap152_c.pdf - December 2024

> In this paper, we employ an instrument and individual-level banking data in Brazil to examine the effects of a novel payment technology, Pix, on the use of other payment technologies and its impact on the banking sector. We find evidence that Pix increases use of the four most common payment technologies in Brazil among individuals and firms. Furthermore, our empirical evidence suggests that Pix contributes to an increase in the number of bank accounts, their use and access to credit, benefiting different types of banks. The findings indicate that the implementation of new payment technologies yields advantages not only for firms and individuals but also for the broader banking and payment industry.

If the US had any foresight it could stave this off by making its own global payments system be the one with the lowest fees, and thereby keep people using US currency and US institutions.

Whereas if you give other countries the obvious win that they can stop paying ~3% of their entire economy to a foreign payments network then you lose the fees anyway and that other stuff on top of it.

It’s not just about cost, it’s about control and sovereignty. Other countries do not want to have their payment systems rug pulled at the whim of whomever US voters decide to put into office each election cycle. The cost to build your own is reasonable.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Europe Fights to Loosen America’s Grip on Payment Systems - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-16/europe-fi... | https://archive.today/o699I - June 16th, 2026

China nears launch of mBridge as alternative to Swift – report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636931 - June 2026

> Other countries do not want to have their payment systems rug pulled at the whim of whomever US voters decide to put into office each election cycle.

Which is the reason the US is also shooting itself in the foot every time it rug pulls them.

If you want people to trust and rely on your thing then you kind of need to avoid being untrustworthy and unreliable.

If trust and reliability were a priority for America, we wouldn't be where we are today.

The US spent a hundred years building up soft power and all it takes to sink it is one mad emperor.

> If the US had any foresight it could stave this off by making its own global payments system be the one with the lowest fees,

What global payments system? We have the worst payment systems in the developed world.

The US money transfer situation is so bad that all the major banks got tired of The Fed's incompetence...and simply bypassed The Fed. That's how we ended up with Zelle, which actually does instantaneous (or at least within minutes) transfers.

In 2026 it is virtually impossible to quickly move money from one account to another because every single bit of it has to pass through the US Federal Reserve's ancient systems. We're the laughing stock of the rest of the world's banking systems. Thirty years ago europeans could walk into a store, do a fund transfer to pay for something, and walk out. We still can't do that.

Literally the only way to buy something expensive in a store in the US is via credit card.

You can't use a debit card because of transaction limits and lack of consumer protections.

You can't use any of the "app" payment methods.

You can't do wire transfers.

You can't do checks because the US check clearing system is so bad, a check can initially clear (after a day or five), and then weeks later, bounce.

You can't do cash because it's now legal for cops to consider having an unusual amount of cash to be enough for reasonable suspicion and they've done some gymnastics that allow them to seize the cash and keep it even if the person is not charged or charges are dismissed.

Notice that this is entirely a regulatory problem. Do we imagine that entrepreneurs in the US can't produce the technology for a good payments system? That's not the reason. The reason is that anyone who wants to build it gets squished by the regulators captured by Visa and Mastercard because they don't want anything that would take away their cut.

Zelle made it through by having various limitations that make it hard for it to displace credit cards, and even that took decades before it happened.

> You can't use a debit card because of transaction limits and lack of consumer protections.

My debit card is branded Visa so it has the Visa Zero Liability protections, and I can raise the purchase limit from $6k to $25k using the app.

Zelle is not actually instantaneous. It is a frontend to ACH. The clearing of transactions still takes days.

>In 2026 it is virtually impossible to quickly move money from one account to another because every single bit of it has to pass through the US Federal Reserve's ancient systems

Which is why FedNow went live in 2024. In 2025 it already completed processing of $864 billion in transactions in real time.

https://www.frbservices.org/resources/financial-services/fed...

2026 is already looking to exceed $1 trillion in transactions.

> Whereas if you give other countries the obvious win that they can stop paying ~3% of their entire economy to a foreign payments network

To be fair:

- 3% is on the higher end of the fees amounts. In the EU they are now capped at 0.3% for example

- part of the interchange fee goes to the issuing bank, which is usually local