Card-based transactions becoming so pervasive has made me wonder if countries should start redirecting their efforts to building nationalised payment infrastructure that would allow citizens to transact electronically with zero fees, rather than their main function being managing and printing physical currency. Maybe some countries have done this already, but in Australia at least we're basically building our entire payment infrastructure on top of Visa and Mastercard.
Worse, is that Visa/MC/Paypal are "private" companies which can impose whatever religious slant they want, on whatever transactions they want, and your recourse as a consumer is "use the free market to pick a different payment processor".
Cash doesn't care if you're buying groceries or porn. Visa very much does.
This is the fundamentally most important issue. You should not be forced to use the services of any private company to get through the basics of life. It should be an option to choose between many, but also the option to choose none.
Cash is issues by the government, it's the same for all of use, anyone is free to use it. It can't be suspended or remotely wiped, cash transactions cannot be supervised (and thus sometimes blocked) by a third party.
You can grow your own food, or trade with a neighbor or buy at farmers markets etc. Also, there are thousands of options where to buy food so there is no corporation oligopoly that can ban you from buying food.
Same for clothing. Housing you pretty much always buy from a private individual, never from a corporation.
Contrast these to a dystopian world where you're only allowed to make transaction with a credit card but visa & mastercard (private megacorporations) decide to ban you. That's it, you're basically not part of society anymore. (Sure there's discover and amex but their acceptance in most places is low.)
Most things people assume the US government "does" is performed by contractors. Even program management may be outsourced to specialty firms. The more first-hand knowledge I gain about any department, the more I believe this is universal.
That's certainly the case. The problem is the legal and social framework hasn't caught up with the times. It wasn't that long ago that the government was small enough to be funded entirely by tariffs. Everything has been outsourced but it's still treated as not a government action so we get all sorts of nasty things like unaccountable private prisons.
I know that; real-time interbank settlement is the first and necessary step for real-time consumer settlement. ACH, our current interbank system, is incapable of real-time settlement.
> ACH, our current interbank system, is incapable of real-time settlement.
This might be nitpicky given the outcome is the same, but: That was once true but is no longer the case. Nearly-instant and same-day ACH are available now, but not widely and not typically available directly to consumers.
Don't forget that Australia has EFTPOS and most debit cards are co-branded. The RBA is pushing for transactions to be routed over EFTPOS when possible [1].
And obviously, NPP continues to be rolled out: Osko is now widely available and PayTo [2] will be rolled out throughout 2024.
Part of the problem with that is the lions' share of fees go towards managing a lot of fraud and contested payments. So it's one thing to build a payment infrastructure, but if you don't actively manage it to protect users then it's going to be a massive cesspool of abuse.
> if countries should start redirecting their efforts to building nationalised payment infrastructure that would allow citizens to transact electronically with zero fees
Already done in China, India, and Brazil, but they also largely sidestepped the Credit Card revolution.
