• TheMurphy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    9 months ago

    With this digital euro, all fees are paid by the EU. Which is the right way to do it. It shouldn’t cost anything to spend and transfer money - just as it doesn’t with cash.

    I can’t get my head around how much money VISA and MasterCard is pulling out of society today.

    How banks take fees for you to do a simple money transfer.

    Scumbags.

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.worldEnglish
      72·
      9 months ago

      It shouldn’t cost anything to spend and transfer money - just as it doesn’t with cash.

      Yeah there’s no such thing as free lunch. Cash is not free and neither is this new EU currency. The costs are hidden from you but they are there.

      When you buy a pizza in cash for example, you’re not just paying for the pizza. You’re also paying for the business to send someone to the bank regularly to deposit earnings and and withdraw coins to give customers as change. And the bank is doing the same thing - all those armoured cars delivering cash to ATMs around the city? Those are not cheap and you are paying for them.

      Worst of all, cash tends to go missing - Maybe an employee gave a customer two twenty dollar bills in change when it should have been one… or maybe the employee pocketed the 20 bucks. The business has no way of knowing which and both happen regularly. Either way the customer ultimately pays - the business sets prices high enough to cover those costs.

      Ask anyone who keeps track of this stuff for a large business, they will tell you credit cards are cheaper for them.

      I can’t get my head around how much money VISA and MasterCard is pulling out of society today.

      It’s mostly insurance. Because while cash goes “missing” more often, credit cards still has issues (stolen card numbers and occasionally software bugs) and unlike cash, where the business pays, with credit cards often VISA/MasterCard often have to pay. The fees are partly to cover that. And the fees also cover the money they spent trying to prevent money from going missing (they spend a lot of money on that).

      How banks take fees for you to do a simple money transfer.

      Mine doesn’t. They make monthly deposits into my account based on how much money I have there and how much they were able to profit off using it for investments.

      it’s a Credit Union, so technically I’m a shareholder and the entire business model of the bank is to make money for their shareholders (me). You too can be a bank shareholder. The only “fees” they charge are to pay for employees and customer service, and those are far less than what I earn in interest on my savings.

      I can’t get my head around how much money VISA and MasterCard is pulling out of society today.

  • asudox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    GNU Taler is more fit to be the next mainstream way of paying with your phone or online. But it definitely does not replace cash. Not in any privacy sense. It is still digital, and anything digital can and will eventually be hacked at some point. But it’s miles better than using my debit card, so I’d always prefer this over my debit card whenever possible. Though if I really want to be anonymous, physical cash is still the way to go. GNU Taler sits somewhere between normal physical cash and debit cards in terms of privacy. I hope it wins.