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Well this means that there is still a payment provider doing the barcode system. This payment provider could still block certain vendors. It works excellently to protect the privacy of the buyer, though.
This is why monero exists, digital cash that works
I was going to make a joke comment about crypto but you beat me to it
Who operates the cash kiosks?
In this case, it’s the chain convenience stores (FamilyMart, 711, Lawson). They handle cash anyway and can be found nearly everywhere in Japan.
So presumably they wire the money to the online retailer. Could they refuse to do business with a particular seller?
Presumably they in fact use a payment processor rather than interacting directly with the business’ bank, and that payment processor if it’s not something like MasterCard anyway, will still have huge power.
I wish I could pay in cash for online purchases from Amazon. Amazon has such a privacy nightmare that I cannot even hide or delete my purchase history. I know deleting the history doesn’t remove the trait or nullify anything, but the fact that it remains visible on your account is stupid. There are purchases that I dont want anyone looking at my account to know and sometimes I just like clearing it. I don’t care for shit I bought back in 2018 anymore.
Alternate account?
Any better alternatives?
In the BeNeLux we have bol.com, a local alternative to amazon because amazon didn’t want to comply to our laws.
I use guest account on ebay. Works fine
Ebay is paypal and super evil too.
There are only 4 ways to earn in crypto.
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Mining: - Power Your Own Network Use your hardware to solve puzzles and secure the chain. It’s the digital equivalent of digging your own well. Join a pool for steady drips or go solo for a risky strike. Remember, they can tax your electricity, but not your proof-of-work. https://www.f2pool.com/ https://www.nicehash.com/
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Airdrops & Faucets: Claim the Digital Commons These are not handouts; they’re early-user dividends from protocols that bypass traditional finance. Take what’s offered. It’s practice for a system where your attention and participation are the only credentials required. https://airdrops.io/ https://earni.fi/
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Trading: Navigate the Chaos Buying and selling on decentralized exchanges is a direct market action, free from a central authority’s halt button. The volatility they create is the risk we navigate for self-determined profit. It’s raw, unforgiving, and sovereign. https://app.uniswap.org/
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Stateless Wallets: Autonomous Capital This is the frontier. A stateless wallet is a non-custodial system that auto-swaps your assets internally. It doesn’t just hold value; it actively rebalances and seeks yield based on market fluctuations, entirely within your control. It’s a self-managing vault, operating on logic they cannot dictate or shut down. In a world of control, this is pure, automated defiance. https://neutswap.com/
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Makes me wonder: how are they not have the same stronghold in Europe? They’re also everywhere there as well.
They do, but people also do a lot of bank transfers. Which is essentially a cash payment. But if you don’t have a local bank account and app, or the Wise app, then credit cards work just fine most places.
Albania is the only place I’ve seen that has zero trust in anything but cash, but that’s because their socialist era was so restrictive that after that regime fell, people were wholly unable to understand how basic things like banks or economics works. A single pyramid scheme basically crashed the government in 1996-97. It’s a fascinating story about how much learning a society has to do to change from an oppressive regime to something else.
In the Netherlands we have iDeal, which will be turned into an European standard soon
Barcode?
Also I don’t think physical cash is a desirable alternative to the convenience of electronic payment.
If you care about your privacy it is.
electronic money can be taken away in an instant, by hackers, by your bank, by your government. You can lose access to your phone and other means of proving it’s you to use it. Cash is still cash, and having enough to get through an emergency is important.
If in the US, you want enough to bail your loved ones out of jail too, there are obscene fees involved for paying electronically.
Physical cash can be taken as well. All wealth can be stolen and all doors that function as doors can be broken into, physical or electronic.
Yeah for sure. Police in the us will steal your physical cash if they can find it too, where they can’t really steal your bank money, not with the so called civil asset forfeiture.
Do not keep all your eggs in one basket. If you have any eggs to put in baskets in the first place.
That is why the idea of cryptocurrency has caught on, a medium of exchange outside the control of government, that could be accessed electronically anywhere, but anonymous if you know what you are doing. No court orders to freeze your accounts. Obviously there are so many scammers into crypto it’s a nightmare but the idea, and bitcoin so far working if horribly environmentally destructive for no good reason, is still a seductive idea. A libertarian’s wet dream.
As someone who wants to be as untrackable as possible without arousing suspicion, yes please gimme cash for online transactions.
Privacy in currency use doesn’t have to be in the form of physical cash though.
This kinda requires having a heavily consolidated convenience store industry with a lot of locations. Japan has both of these the US not so much. Urban sprawl, a physically larger country, and a culture of not using convenience stores as much kinda make this hard. Also said stores would likely need to register AML and KYC controls.
Would post office work better for US?
We used to have postal banking - this is a very good argument to bring it back
Maybe. The lines in my local post office are always long but they do exist. I can’t come up with an easy way for the Comstock act to prohibit it being used for adult material but then again I don’t work for the “Heritage” Foundation.
Then again Congress likes it’s puritannical laws and would need to create such a service.
At first, I was only thinking about the ubiquity of post offices and that they already reach rural areas. But the government aspect does add a bit more too. Feels like it’s official to use government currency in a government building instead of a local convenience store.
Honestly this type of transaction seems like it could easily be an automated kiosk. Scan barcode / QR code. Insert cash. Get receipt. Employees nearby to help if needed. Done
Kiosk could work, but I could see that thing being perpetually broken after a few months of (mis)use.
It also requires not being dominated by people who think lack of options is a feature they can exploit and would happily destroy society if it meant that whatever was left was more dependent on them (partially to profit from it, partially to hold the keys to control who can access it and how).
People do heavily use gas stations which are about the same thing
True. This is one thing we still need to buy in person, and can’t have delivered, so gas stations exist even in the smallest towns.
The other place, of course, is grocery stores. I can pay in cash at the self-checkout in Walmart, and the machines scan barcodes. So, that’s another option.
Here in Czechia you can pay for online transactions with instant direct bank transfer, so cards are not really needed. This is often used for direct transfers between individuals where one generates a QR code on his phone and the other scans it.
That’s because Europe has SEPA, which are used in the EU.
Europeans mind can’t comprehend the issues of american banks.
They are so bad, it doesn’t make any sense.
SEPA pertains only to EUR, Czechia uses CZK
No.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retail/sepa/html/index.en.html
SEPA not only includes non-Euro countries, it also includes non-EU countries.
EUR is a symbol for Euro currency. I could have made that clear.
That changes nothing.
How are you going to use it to transfer CZK?
Have you never used it?
Or cheched out the link?
Wtf
Europeans mind can’t comprehend the issues of american banks.
Still need an American credit card to rent a car tho
No you don’t? What are you talking about?
Car rentals almost exclusively accept payment by credit card, unless you have a corporate account that is billed periodically.
I’m sure you can find an exception but please let’s not fly off to nitpick land.
I’ve literally rented cars in Greece using cash.
They do require some form of identification for obvious reasons, but that is about it.
None of the rental places required credit cards.
If you have an account in any European bank, you can pay by bank transfer or SEPA in basically any European business, and often it’s their favourite way to do it because there is no commission. I don’t know country by country, but in Germany the standard for payment system is Girocard which is German payment processing, and the cards usually come equipped with both it and some American standard like visa and mastercard, but a lot of people opt out, if they don’t care about payment outside of Europe.
Any car rental worth it’s salt in Europe will accept some form of SEPA, but also, renting a car is not an essential part of people’s lives here, so it’s not even something people care about that muchbut also, renting a car is not an essential part of people’s lives here
It may not be part of your life, but I’ve done it hundreds of time as a travelling tech (plus a few as a tourist), and I’ve had times when airports with hundreds/thousands of rental cars had trouble satisfying demand, so it seems there are others with the same need.
And no, they don’t accept SEPA, although terms vary by country, and if they do they require a safety deposit that can go from a few hundred euros to the thousands, not exactly practical.
How is a deposit not practical? Unless they require it in cash that has to then at the end be picked up at the pickup point (which would be crazy)? A rental company is taking a huge risk by renting cars to any random person with a driving license. It’s the same reason they don’t typically rent to people below 25 (or without a higher deposit).
It’s really only unpractical if you don’t have enough money on your account to afford the deposit, but then why are you renting cars? Otherwise you just pay a bit more the first time and then get that money deposited back on your account when you return the car. There’s basically no difference in the end other than a bigger number the first time, and if you wreck the car or something, you will lose the deposit through your credit card too.
Being traveling tech is absolutely not usual occupancy, so it doesn’t change what I said. But if you work in Europe and traveling around, and moving around instruments is part of your job, you should have a company card anyway for it, so again, it doesn’t really matter for the rest of Europeans.
What I’m trying to convey, that even though you will have some incompetence without American run banking systems, unless you’re in a very specific operation, like needing to rent a car at an airport for example, you wouldn’t be severely inconvenient.
I’m saying it as a refugee from a country that (for justifiable reasons) is getting some negativity around, and being born there I’m deemed not actually a good person in advance, and it took me a lot of time to convince various governments that I’m not a dangerous exemplar of my race. The time I spent without access to international banking systems like Visa weren’t debilitating, even though inconvenient at times.
My parents are not from the USA and don’t have USA bank accounts or credit cards and have had no problems renting a car in Europe or anywhere else they went. I really don’t get what you mean. I don’t see why you specifically need an American card and not just a credit card from any modern country.
Eu banks typically use a MasterCard or Visa partnership for their credit cards. The EU bank might issue the credit card to their customer, but the actual payment processor is an american company. If MasterCard/visa starts blocking certain payments, then there’s nothing that the EU bank can do about it.
You can know which payment processor your bank’s credit cards uses by the presence of a small logo on the front of the card. 2 overlapping red and orange circles = mastercard network.
As for car rental companies, Hertz has some wonderfully twisted logic on their Belgian site where they say that they accept debet payments from any eu bank card, as long as the card has the visa or Mastercard logo. In other words, they only accept Mastercard or Visa payments, not eu debet payments.
I mean if you don’t understand things you should ask, not assume others are in the wrong. Yeah it would be pretty stupid to be forced to have US accounts to rent cars in Europe, luckily we’re not THAT stupid.
VISA and MasterCard are practically a monopoly on credit card circuits, your parents’ cards may be issued by a local bank but there’s a 95% chance they’ve got one of these two companies’ logo printed on them, and out of every payment they make, these AMERICAN companies get 2% (blah blah cashback, blah blah terms and conditions), because they are made on their circuits!
You may also have debit cards that DON’T have those logos, but debit cards can’t be used for car rentals.you should ask, not assume others are in the wrong.
You also shouldn’t assume that, maybe if you think others don’t understand something, it’s actually because you’re wrong
I did ask. Specifically I asked what you were talking about. All you really had to say was Visa and MasterCard are USA companies that handle card transactions. If you had clarified that initially you wouldn’t be getting downvoted to hell.
I think you are making too sweeping of a statement here. Maybe this is the case for car rentals you encounter / have access to but the response should show that’s not the case everywhere in the EU. I rented a car without a credit card over 5 years ago where I’m from. You do pay a deposit that I suppose a credit card would normally insure for, but the option exists. Either way, if a car rental requires a credit card, I would not even consider renting with them. That’s ridiculous.
Look, if you go to mom and pop’s car rental, sure, they can accept hens as payment if they like. If you use car rentals the most common way, as a supplement for airport travel, you rent one in your city, you use it to go to the airport, return it, fly to your destination, rent another car at the airport, do your things, go back, repeat. At those locations you’ll only have the big names, AVIS, Hertz, Europcar… Those are mostly credit-card or corporate account exclusive. And corporate accounts are expensive, at my former company we had a bunch of people travelling constantly and it still wasn’t economically advantageous, apparently.
Also, you are just wrong about the big names you mentioned:
spoiler
Debit Cards – Accepted in many countries, but restrictions apply (see below)
In some countries, only credit cards are accepted—unless you’ve prepaid online with a debit card. If you prepaid your rental with a debit card, you must bring the same card to the counter, along with a valid credit card for the deposit. Your card must be in the name of the main driver, and valid for the entire duration of the rental.
Mini and Economy class; debit or credit card;
FVMR; debit or credit card;
Passenger van (9 pers.); debit or credit card;
Van; cash, debit card, or credit card;
Your debit card is now welcome at Hertz in Europe. Here at Hertz we like to make renting a car personal. You decide what to drive and where to drive, and now you can choose how to pay.
We welcome debit cards across our European locations. We want your journey with us to be easy, so giving you options on how to pay puts you in the driving seat. No complicated processes – a simple deposit that works the same for credit cards as debit cards. Go your own way. Pay your own way.
You never said your statement was just about airport car rentals. Over here that is very likely not the most common usage of rentals (and certainly if you exclude business travel and holidays), since airports are far between, but car rentals are all over the place, far away from those airports. You rent cars over here if you dont own a car and need transportation. Or if you have to move a large amount of items you rent a van.
Besides, you can simply take the bus or train from any airport to a real car rental which should be close by in any major city. Of course if you go do it in a business hub you will find scams for the average person. Does that sacrifice a little bit of convenience, sure. But if you buy all your water from street vendors at a tourist attraction we dont claim water is expensive.
I can see you are simply from a very different world, that of business travel, which is why your perspective is so different.
EDIT: And no, I didn’t use a mom and pop shop, I used the biggest car renter in my country (Netherlands) with over 130 locations.
in Poland we have something similar! we have BLIK and it generates a code for you that the other person taps into their terminal/you tap into an online purchase window, then it tells you to confirm again in the app and there you go, paid
there’s also BLIK phone transfers, you just need the other person’s phone number and (provided they have their bank linked to their phone number ofc) you can send money to their account that way
i haven’t paid attention to it recently but when this was being introduced they also added a cheeky “this transaction only took you 30s ;)” at the end lol
We can also buy paysafecards in convenience stores, and these are actually anonymous, unlike Blik.
Also if for some reason you really have to use cash, PaysafeCards are still an option.
Just grab one from a nearest vendor and the code on the reciept is tied to a balance starting with the amount on the card.
it was very confusing when I was given a qr code as an option to pay on a restaurant in Czechia 😂
This should be higher up in relevance.
We now have the technological means to make online payments better in many ways for both customers and vendors. We just need to move away from one of the biggest American exports, middlemen.
How are we going to do that? What’s the payment method everyone should use for now?
- Natural monopolies should be nationalised. Network effects tend to be a significant characteristic of natural monopolies (my opinion).
- Payment infrastructure is critical for national security. Just the way cash is.
This is why imo, there should be a nationalised institution competing against private institutions like these.
- the nationalised institution must be owned by the state.
- its operations however must be organized as a consumer coop, where cardholders of this payment network are member owners. This would prevent the top down bureaucracy, corruption and inefficiencies that plague state owned corps.
Wow, I had no idea you could do that in Japan, and the idea never crossed my mind.
That’s a brilliant solution to online payments.
You can even do this in Uniqlo when not in Japan. Make an online purchase, pay in store within 1 hour, and then it’s like you made an in-store purchase (with all the benefits).
There’s always money in the banana stand.
