Re:CurrentC: The Big Retailers’ Clunky Attempt to Kill Apple...
by sytelus on Monday October 27, 2014 @06:39AM
(#8514730)
While CurrentC sucks, it's hard to blame retailers. When you use your credit cards, you are the one paying that extra 2% for the privilege to use a piece of plastic because every single merchants simply transfer that cost on to you. Apple Pay only makes getting rid of whole evil of credit cards harder.
Credit cards are drag on consumers and invisible tax created by banking system. They are effortless machines that generates profits without producing anything or adding a significant value. Before you make a case that credit cards protects against frauds, you should know that less than 1/700 of each dollar of credit card transactions are lost due to fraud. So in essence, 99.93% of your transaction fees goes in to bank and other middleman's pockets for no apparent value add. A small part of this CC companies throws at you as "reward" breadcrumbs. Also credit cards are hardly useful as debt instruments because of exorbitant interest rates most of them carry.
What we need is not another mechanism to use credit cards more easily but eliminate them completely. So if we can build a mechanism that identifies you, debits some sort of spending account directly and provide fraud insurance at the rate of 0.07% of your annual charges then we can get rid of all these fat middlemans who are essentially leaching on consumers without a value add. CurrentC doesn't seem like perfect contender yet but it's step in right direction where retailers are fighting back.
Credit cards are drag on consumers and invisible tax created by banking system. They are effortless machines that generates profits without producing anything or adding a significant value. Before you make a case that credit cards protects against frauds, you should know that less than 1/700 of each dollar of credit card transactions are lost due to fraud. So in essence, 99.93% of your transaction fees goes in to bank and other middleman's pockets for no apparent value add. A small part of this CC companies throws at you as "reward" breadcrumbs. Also credit cards are hardly useful as debt instruments because of exorbitant interest rates most of them carry.
What we need is not another mechanism to use credit cards more easily but eliminate them completely. So if we can build a mechanism that identifies you, debits some sort of spending account directly and provide fraud insurance at the rate of 0.07% of your annual charges then we can get rid of all these fat middlemans who are essentially leaching on consumers without a value add. CurrentC doesn't seem like perfect contender yet but it's step in right direction where retailers are fighting back.