It boggles my mind that the government has privatized currency to these people.
Crazy-person-but-actually-really practical-idea:
Nationalize one if these networks. Maybe Discover.
The US government should provide us digital currency. The simplest way is to force the current systems to do that. All that rent they collect in terms of transactions fees shouldn't be profit for a private business but fees of the government.
PayShap in South Africa, not sure if it is being attacked yet. I use it a couple of times a week. It's awesome & better than EFT's, enables cheap instant transfer even between banks. It's not a third party private company either, its offered by the reserve bank / bankserv.
I think it is to reduce the amount of cash in circulation, get visible on small transfers and to relieve the EFT clearing houses.
Taking current political climate into account, Lula is too popular to straight up kidnap like the Venezuelan president, and the American-backed candidate isn't pooling incredibly well.
My experiences with the DMV have actually been pretty decent. I think a lot of their negative reputation is from how it used to be, but that they have improved substantially since then?
DMV is a state level agency and varies a lot depending on where you are. It's partially privatized here in Oklahoma and mostly painless (you only need the actual DMV for driver's tests, CDL background checks, etc.) but when I lived on the Illinois side of St. Louis I routinely heard of people spending hours in line.
Normally I'm not a huge fan of privatization but the way it's done here works great. The fees are set by the state and the agency gets a percentage, so if an area is underserved someone just opens another one.
I don't know if you're aware, but there was a whole lot of controversy around Central Bank Digital Currencies a few years ago. Mainly because the government can instantly see every transaction you do and will use it to decide if you're a terrorist or not, and they have a terrorist catching quota. They can also instantly block your account. And if such system is available, the government will phase out cash.
Each of those networks carry a lot, a lot of ancient stuff. Gov is better off building a brand new network from scratch and promote it as a standard for banks to join.
There are plenty of great examples from this century all over the world.
> Even Iran has a better payment infra than the US.
That is a big claim. What would prevent someone from setting up something equally as good in the US, aside from the network effect and users unwilling to try something new for uncertain gain?
End-users don't have much agency here, network needs banks.
In Iran, they simply don't have much choice, so banks use the only network available to them. It just happens to have been built in this century, so it's not as archaic as Visa.
Here in the US, I guess only regulators could realistically create a new network and have enough power to convince banks to adopt it.
Nothing, of course, stops anyone from creating a new network. But the network effect is THE driving force here, it's not a minor factor.
Crazy-person-but-actually-really practical-idea:
Nationalize one if these networks. Maybe Discover.
The US government should provide us digital currency. The simplest way is to force the current systems to do that. All that rent they collect in terms of transactions fees shouldn't be profit for a private business but fees of the government.