Not just Visa/Master Card. Banks themselves have been known to deny business accounts to sex workers because of whatever reason they can think of, forcing them to use personal bank accounts that then get them banned because of "business use".

The 3000 euro limit will pose a problem for these businesses, though I suppose you could just take out half a dozen cards and rotate funds.

Not really, in the Netherlands prostitution is legal but sexworkers have a hard time getting bank accounts.

The banks are wary of the connection to human trafficking and the obvious 99% cash transactions.

I would argue that physical currency transfer is already public infrastructure, in the terms of coins and notes that are physically given.

So it only makes sense that digital currency is too.

> Electricity, water, roads, bridges are all public infrastructure. Why should payments be any different.

I think you fail to understand why these are public infrastructure.

Why should water be public infra but food is not?

Electricity, water, roads and bridges are natural monopolies.

Payments aren't and there is no reason for the State to monopolize it. Especially given the EU poor track record on fostering innovation. The EU bureaucrats will "regulate" it to the bone, increasing compliance costs for processors and mass surveillance. We'll be back to the start.

X, Y, Z are not public infrastructure, why should payments be any different?

Sweden, a counntry in the EU, did this in 2012.

Then they introduced a (small) fee.

Apparently Norway's Vipps is free for small amounts, but charges 1% for large.

Too tempting for the EU not to play, but that will replace a duopoly with a monopoly, which will end up doing what monopolies have always done. "For the greater good" here is to incentivize competition.

I don't believe the Indian system works based on cryptocurrency, so I don't think the same expectations can be held.

The concept is hardly revolutionary within Europe, though. Back in 1996, the Dutch "ChipKnip" was introduced, where you could store a small amount of money directly on a bank card so payment terminals wouldn't need permanent internet access to process payments. This was abandoned when wireless payment technologies were introduced, but the concept has been around for decades.

Like so many fine-working systems, this system only worked within one country. The EU is now trying to solve this problem for every member country, which means convincing banks and financial institutions that whatever reasoning blocked their participation in earlier non-American systems are now no longer a problem.

Tracking is a tiny little fraction of percent of bad stuff which can be done with CBDC. CBDC allow for direct control of every single CBDC cent on the whole planet. And direct control means that every single denomination can be programmed (since they are all non-fungible) to be allowed to be spent only on specific state approved goods, or in the state approved shops. It can have expiry date. It can be restricted as to who can send money to whom, per account. And of course it can and will be tracked forever with 100% precision.

Are you protesting against yet another Orban? How about your accounts in every country of the world are zeroed now? Automatically. Are you protesting against Danish Stazi 2.0 Chat Control? How about all your money are now frozen and you can only spend a few hundred and only for groceriess, as a punishment? Stuff like that will be possible and easy.

Rather being tracked by EU than being tracked by America (100% guaranteed that US govt as access to all Mastercard/visa transactions).

Last I checked, the application they were working on relied on google services. So at the end of the day it's still an american company that could decide to not let you run it if they want to.

Businesses with slim margins in Germany simply do not have Visa/Mastercard -- only "EC", the German network. Thay means it's not a matter of passing on cost, but it's a choice for the consumer: cash or EC.

If I had to guess, having subbbed to the EC network, or any of the other country specific ones, merchants would simply get the new one as well automatically.

Similar things are happening with online ID where an EU-wide provider is being rolled out and if you as a service provider need KYC-type ID you integrate only with it. Under the hood the user can use any of the national IDs.

While this is true, I've seen plenty of bank-backed ads basically stating "please try paying by card even if it's a small amount, it doesn't cost you extra anymore", sending practically free money towards Mastercard and Visa. Participating banks or even governments could easily set up an equivalent advertising campaign for their new system.

The ability to have mobile payment without the prying eyes of the American government alone could be a good ad. I'm sure Trump will start another trade war if an ad actually voices that benefit, though.

In theory, merchants can choose not to support certain payment processors. I can imagine a minimum-price supermarket chain like Lidl eventually dropping Visa and Mastercard to cut costs, for instance.

I hope they will learn from the success of the Brazilian PIX system.

To work-around Apple's draconian NFC for payment rules, many providers aligned on a standard QR-code based solution for payments. I think the Wero service initiative took that even further by having banks work together to support the common format.

As for privacy - at least in Benelux, there are robust laws in place that make it very difficult to even request payment history from personal accounts.

And generally for the EU, all that regulation around GDPR and other data related directives is at play here by default, so there are multiple layers of protections and guardrails to prevent snoopy corporations or other entities from getting such financial info.

A single centralized financial database gives a lot of leverage for additional taxation or costly "compliance requirements" by the EU bureaucracy. Beware of what you wish for.

> Many individual countries already have their payment systems, and have had for a long while.

Yes, but also Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) is a thing already (1). SEPA instant has been live in some places since 2017 (2).

1) https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retail/sepa/html/index.en.htm...

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area#SEPA...

Many countries in EU will have a similar QR code payment system like Thailand based on SEPA. Slovakia is rolling out its own in 2026.

The problem is to standardize all these things built on top of SEPA to work across the UNION.

> I dont understand why it took so long.

EU is pro-privatization to the core. Keeping the production of goods and services outside the democratic sphere is arguably the raison d'etre of EU/EEA.

European cards typically cannot do chargeback.

The EU very purposefully made this all about the Euro. While I'm sure the UK could join in theoretically, there's no political will on the EU's side to support non-Euro currencies in this new system. Countries like Denmark and Hungary may be able to force the EU to work with their currencies, but the end goal of the ECB is to get every EU country to use the Euro eventually.

As much as I'd like to pay in Euros in the UK, I don't think it'll happen.

The UK rejected the Euro to retain sovereignty on monetary policy, and then left the EU altogether. In that respect it would be a bad move to join this even if they could.

Right now it's a bit opposite - you can't purchase using Visa/MC some services that are legal in your country but considered illegal in US. Visa/MC just won't allow that.

According to the public information, bank fees are (or going to be) standardized across the EU's Euro zone. It's in the works for a long time because it's a joint effort and requires a lot of coordination from many involved parties. European Payment Initiative was founded in 2020 but the idea was there since the formation of EU and Euro 20 years ago.

And also it superseeds most of those payment solutions. Wero is based on iDEAL and other european payment systems.

Future goal of the "digital euro" is to get rid of the banks.

For now.

Android is open source, except for specifically the bits that anyone who cares about being sovereign in the face of US interests would want to replace anyway.

Also, last I checked the phones themselves are either made by Foxconn, BYD, or a few Taiwanese-owned factories, so while yes Europe has a problem with the physical devices, it's the same problem the US already has.

You can’t have it all at once. Hopefully one day there’s an alternative OS that’s not owned by and American company, but that shouldn’t stop us from building other things in the meantime

There is massive incentive for all banks to get onboard with this as soon as it's available. Paying a few percent vs nothing at all is the easiest sales argument ever.

This sets a bad precedent. I'm a software contractor from EU, but I don't usually work for EU clients, and I don't want to see the trade wars spill into contracting/dev work - but fully expect it given current trends.

That's a different dependency that can be cut at a later point, if necessary. They don't represent the same systemic risk as payment platforms.

Those china built products you mean?

Baby steps.

> They have a straight track record of acting against their citizens with every single thing they do.

Care to give a couple of examples?

European Union have been meaningfully created so that the enrolled countries economically depends on each other. It came with a lot of downsides (loss of national sovereignty is one of the biggest), also a lot of benefits (bigger market) and the most important of all of those, it came with the longest peace period of the continent in the human history.

It may seems that things are not going in the right direction and I'd agree but we are pretty rich compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, and we are still not at war against each other like we were in the last thousands years so I'll take that.

That's not the case though. Currently, national sovereignty doesn't really exist in this regard as most countries don't have their own national payment system. Also, there already is a European system to settle transactions in Euro: TARGET2, though it is designed for use by banks and other financial institutions only.

Edit: the EU becoming like 1984 is not what we should be wary of. Our societies becoming like "Brave New World" (control through hedonism instead of straightforward repression) is a much more realistic scenario.

Doesn't strike me as bad, the alternative is for Europe to continue its slide into irrelevance (nobody cares about any of the small country individually, only united does it have some leverage against US/China/Russia)

as opposed to having 28 different implementations? give me a break.

SEPA payments are now instant in almost every country. I understand the rollout is gradual but in some of the countries QR payments through SEPA is has been highly popular for few years now.

I have merchants/restaurants asking me if i can pay with QR instead of card because they get more money. And in local eCommerce all the online stores give it as option and often have it as prefered default.

I think the problem is that many countries have huge lag in adoption and often lie about it. Electronic crossborder prescriptions (ePrescription) was pushed and countries claimed to adopt it so they got some EU money yet when you are in Greece (one of the countries claiming support) nobody has ever really heard about ePrescription.

The other problem is constant Not invented here syndrom of Germany that never wants to adopt anything already running and instead invents their own variation.

Because whatever the HN crowd thinks of the EU, the EU is capitalist first. The EU mostly lets the markets figure stuff out, and only steps in when markets fail miserably.

Literally nothing prevented EU banks (or any other banks) from getting together and implementing this.

You have lost faith in the EU because they want to do exactly what you want ...?

Does the Thai payment system work in a German restaurant? Then why should the EU one work in Malaysia?

Can you pay with WeChat in France? Can you pay with CashApp in Ireland?

This is a very silly comment. I for one more than welcome this new payment system.