Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "Goodbye to cash? We have interviewed the ECB and we know the answer." video.

  1. Fun fact, years ago, I set my dad with a bank, and I specifically explained to the bank, they need to issue him a MasterCard, because he needed to pay in Germany a lot and Visa was basically unheard off in Germany at the time. Well, a year later, the bank switched and, what followed was five years of praying, whether locals accept Visa. Things are fortunately better now. These days, if you pay by credit card, you get charged an extra fee for it... (happened to me recently)
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  2. So, my phone doesn't have NFC. Czech banks came up with a service, that allows you to look up an account using a phone number, if the other party has it set up. If not, they can simply give me their bank details and I can set up a wire from my phone, if needed, or if it's a bigger amount, from my PC. You can already pay fines by card. All regular governmental money interactions I have are doable by wire (It's actually the prefferred method around here). Furthermore, there's the problem of getting debanked, as happened to Farage a while back. What will you do, if no bank touches you? There is clause about banks being able to do that for whatever reason they deem fit in every contract I have ever seen! The fact, that you can't change your bank account number, when you're with a bank, is redheairing. You can always have 50 bank accounts (I already am on 10) and simply wire money between them as needed. In most of Europe, SEPA payments are free for normal people and they can be accross borders, no problems whatsoever. Hell, when I was working as accountant, I was regularly returning money from Czechia to the Nordics, Baltics, France, Germany, Greece... there are publically available tools like ibanvalidator, which allows you to validate any IBAN or calculate IBAN from a domestic account number of that account. And it works for the whole world! Meaning so long, you actually know the account number, you can send the money over! Meaning, we'd rather need legislation otlawing the practice of IBAN discrimination and make it mandatory to accept cards! You can open up extra accounts to pool money for common purchases. I run such an account for our entire family! Conditional cash scares me to hell! Imagine this. You build yourself a PC and install Windows, because everything is still made for Windows... and Microsoft, heading for their service based business model, decided to charge you per minute in use?! There are payment providers with domestic technologies. It is also not entirely true, that payment providers are not based in the EU. SWIFT is in Belgium... In the Netherlands, they used to have (not sure whether still have) cards, that were not international standard, but carried the number of the account itself on it instead! There's nothing easier than mandating IBAN to also be printed on a card, perhaps even with a QR code for a machine to read it and request a payment over the Internet, simply, by asking the bank running the account, to transfer the money, which could be approved by the account holder from his phone or even (better) dedicated token. We already use multibanking (managing accounts from different banks through other banks), so communication between the banks is not an issue. The very fact, that somebody holds a record is a problem, particularly if part of that record was, what was bought. As for offline payments... we already have prepaid cards around here. They are very rare, true, but they exist. So offline Euro would be useless thing, that could cause more trouble than worth. All in all, as staunchly pro European guy am I, I see no use for this and costs associated with the system. :(
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