|
My limited understanding of this is that companies like Square and Stripe bypass a lot of this by simply acting as a card processor with better tech. If paypal didn't actually hold any of the money passing through their system, they wouldn't be as accountable for it, no?
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2016 01:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 13:26 |
|
|
Baby Babbeh posted:For the most part the banks buy innovation or they partner on highly unequal terms rather than compete directly. It plays to their strengths — they move at a pace that makes continental drift seem speedy, but they have a fuckton of cash since they essentially collect rent on any and all business activity within their sphere. What normally happens when a new financial tech category opens up is the banks wait 5 to 10 years for the market to coalesce around a winner, then they just buy the winner and everybody else who's doing whatever it is can get hosed. So the obvious money is in custom currency, right? Forget BitCoins, let's make YouCoins! You could set it up so that people can trade in currency based on your time. So like because I'm early adopter each ToxieCoin is actually worth $50,000 and if you buy one you get to tell me what to do for two hours.
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2016 02:00
|
|
|
MiddleOne posted:That's actually a high-spending speciality market which actually makes it worth more in terms of dollars per 1000 views. Furries always manage to shock me with the amount of money some of them are willing to throw at anything and everything furry. And then I think about how unhappy someone must be with their own body/self/situation that they are willing to spend thousands on random porn art commissions which include their avatar fulfilling the fetishes that they themselves can never actually fulfill and it makes me a bit sad.
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2016 03:54
|
|
|
Dr. Fishopolis posted:My limited understanding of this is that companies like Square and Stripe bypass a lot of this by simply acting as a card processor with better tech. If paypal didn't actually hold any of the money passing through their system, they wouldn't be as accountable for it, no? Yes and no. The thing you have to understand is that no matter what company you're using to make a payment, if it's on a credit card it's really being processed by a network set up and maintained by card networks like Visa and Mastercard on top of clunky bank infrastructure. All of the cool tech provided by companies like Stripe et al. is on the front end, basically -- at the end of the day it's still the same payment rails that haven't changed fundamentally since consumer credit cards were invented in the 50s. To process on this system, you need a merchant account that authorizes you to use the network to move money, and a terminal to capture payment info and transmit it to the network. I don't want to get too into the weeds with this, but the salient point is that the person who owns the merchant account is ultimately considered to be responsible for the payment, and they're the person who faces most of the liability if there's fraud. The earliest online payment companies, usually called gateways, basically just provided a terminal. They created software that worked the same way for online payments that a credit swiper did for offline payments. It was up to the merchant to get their own merchant account from a bank and connect it before payments could be processed. These guys had no liability -- their software was basically dumb pipe and they didn't own the merchant accounts, so they didn't have to worry about fraud. The tradeoff was that their addressable market was limited -- getting a merchant account is a pain in the rear end and not everyone can qualify, so gateways missed out on the explosion in volume from ordinary folks hawking Beanie Babies online. PayPal's essential innovation was to remove the need for an individual to have their own merchant account by just settling payments into an account it owned and then paying it out to the end recipient. Obviously, PayPal accepted a lot of the risk here, so once they learned what chargebacks were (One early PayPal guy told me they honestly had no clue when they started -- they hired a payment consultant and once he explained what they were they pointed him at a giant pile of unopened mail from their acquirer) they had to start building controls to manage it. Stripe does have a product that allows a company to basically build it's own internal version of PayPal by using Stripe tech to provision accounts and settle money into and out of a master merchant account that it owns. It's called Stripe Managed Accounts, and it shifts all that liability off onto the platform that's using it. This isn't Stripe's main product however. That's Stripe Connect, which is basically an updated version of what PayPal does. They have a much nicer interface and some things are handled slightly differently in ways that limit their liability and the scope of regulatory oversight they have to comply with. But at the end of the day they're still on the hook for a lot of fraud. To the extent that you don't hear as much about them freezing funds and pissing people off, it's because they've benefited from 15+ years of innovation in fraud technology and got to start fresh without building off an awful legacy code base like PayPal. Square I'm less sure about because I don't deal with the card-present world as much, but if they're provisioning merchant accounts they have the same issues in theory. The good news is that card-present transactions are much less risky and the interchange is a lot lower which gives them a fatter margin to play with. But they also have to deal with all the cussedness of providing a hardware product, and I bet their customer acquisition costs are sky high. The SMB market is non-addressable as gently caress and gets harder the lower on the chain you go. This is a big part of why you saw Square experimenting with a lot of other non-core businesses like lending and P2P payments in the period leading up to their IPO. They were trying to juice their growth with new markets because the core was flagging and they had to justify their absurd valuation. It didn't work, so they had to sandbag their price and they've been below their original target for the past year. Payments is a lovely business. Baby Babbeh fucked around with this message at 10:05 on Jul 29, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2016 06:56
|
|
|
Shifty Pony posted:Furries always manage to shock me with the amount of money some of them are willing to throw at anything and everything furry.
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2016 08:06
|
|
|
Baby Babbeh posted:Payments is a lovely business. Also, the amount of fraud out there is just mind blowing. It's so much more than I think almost anyone expects. God help you if you're doing any international payments or dealing with gift cards of any sort. Pretty much anything that could even remotely get used as a money laundering or fraud vehicle now-a-days will be.
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2016 08:12
|
|
|
Which also means that if the U.S. government hasn't already taken an interest in what you're doing, it's a matter of when, not if. Have fun! :bigtran:
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2016 11:37
|
|
|
neonnoodle posted:Which also means that if the U.S. government hasn't already taken an interest in what you're doing, it's a matter of when, not if. Have fun! :bigtran: Do they care about ButtCoins yet?
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2016 17:46
|
|
|
Lemme check nope
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2016 18:29
|
|
|
Time to disrupt sustainable living!
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2016 21:33
|
|
|
The Soylent guy is not having success in disrupting the housing industry edit: I guess I took too long to paste this.
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2016 21:35
|
|
|
Baby Babbeh posted:Payments is a lovely business. This is all super fascinating. Any opinions on Mastercard's "Simplify Commerce" thing? It seems like they're trying to compete with Stripe, but my experience with it a few months post-beta was that it was an even worse pile or garbage than Paypal.
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2016 23:58
|
|
|
e_angst posted:Also, the amount of fraud out there is just mind blowing. It's so much more than I think almost anyone expects. God help you if you're doing any international payments or dealing with gift cards of any sort. Pretty much anything that could even remotely get used as a money laundering or fraud vehicle now-a-days will be. Globally, credit fraud is between a $15 billion to $20 billion annual industry, and it's growing at 20 percent each year. It costs merchants a lot more than that, though. You generally lose 3 dollars for every 1 dollar in fraud that gets through, when you add up the cost of lost merchandise, fines, and the cost of disputes. For a long time it was just online merchants that bore this cost -- card present is considered so much safer that the banks were willing to foot the bill for the chargeback if a brick-and-mortar store processed a stolen card. But they changed that with the introduction of EMV chip cards -- now if you process a stolen card without using the chip, you get to pay the chargeback yourself. I predict a lot of people with older terminals or who can't figure out how to turn EMV on are going to get a nasty shock. Dr. Fishopolis posted:This is all super fascinating. Any opinions on Mastercard's "Simplify Commerce" thing? It seems like they're trying to compete with Stripe, but my experience with it a few months post-beta was that it was an even worse pile or garbage than Paypal. I'm not too familiar with it, which shows you how big a deal it is payment tech circles. It doesn't surprise me though. There's a growing realization in the banking industry that the old way of selling credit processing to small business isn't going to continue for much longer. Even largely offline businesses want to do booking or accept orders online, so just selling somebody a terminal and a merchant account doesn't really cut it. What's more, much of the growth today is in freelancers and micromerchants, and these guys are increasingly likely to just use a platform like Airbnb or Etsy or the like rather than setting up their own. I went to a convention for credit ISOs -- resellers who move merchant accounts on behalf of banks and who traditionally make up the bulk of that market -- and they were terrified. Everything was about how they needed to build their own Stripe competitor to stay relevant. Those things are almost assuredly not as good as Stripe.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2016 04:59
|
|
|
Soundcloud is putting itself for sale, that dog chef must have really cleaned them out.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2016 11:11
|
|
|
Jumpingmanjim posted:Soundcloud is putting itself for sale, that dog chef must have really cleaned them out. Shoot, I actually buy music there.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2016 16:32
|
|
|
Jumpingmanjim posted:Soundcloud is putting itself for sale, that dog chef must have really cleaned them out. Good, hopefully people will move their poo poo to bandcamp, aka an Actual Profitable Business with Revenue. Also, they're asking for a billion dollars. Nevermind the fact that Twitter invested 70 million on a 700 million valuation two weeks ago.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2016 16:42
|
|
|
Uber bashing died down for a while, what will Uber's long term fate be? Lately I've been seeing Uber cars everywhere. They must have pretty bustling business in Las Vegas, where I used to see people taking cabs up and down the strip. Having a way to do it cheaper and faster (in theory) sounds like a no-brainer.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2016 22:00
|
|
|
Panfilo posted:Uber bashing died down for a while, what will Uber's long term fate be? Lately I've been seeing Uber cars everywhere.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2016 22:07
|
|
|
Now where will I find my funny mashups
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2016 22:11
|
|
|
Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:Uber's in Vegas now? Good luck to their driver's kneecaps, the Vegas taxi/limo industry is loving strong, and you're literally taking your life or at least your un-slashed tires in your hands if you're gonna throw a "U" sticker in your winder there. I have no idea, but I was just thinking how profitable it would be if they did. Not surprisingly they are all over the Bay Area here in California. I'm guessing people who already have a full-time job, and were planning to buy a new Prius anyway often get into Uber and use the profits to pay for the car. Its not their primary source of income but while they are doing it they are offsetting the car payment. Also I hate to say it, but anything that keeps drunk drivers off the road helps other motorists in a small way.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2016 22:12
|
|
|
Working for Uber to offset a car payment for a car that you actually want seems really counterproductive. That's a ton of wear and tear and depreciation (especially since you're talking about city driving) that you'd need to offset in addition to gas and the car payment itself.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2016 22:17
|
|
|
Paradoxish posted:Working for Uber to offset a car payment for a car that you actually want seems really counterproductive. That's a ton of wear and tear and depreciation (especially since you're talking about city driving) that you'd need to offset in addition to gas and the car payment itself. That's why its only worth it if you're buying a hybrid. How many miles would you really need to put on it to net $350 a month to cover the payments?
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2016 22:19
|
|
|
How much is a prius?
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2016 22:24
|
|
|
Panfilo posted:That's why its only worth it if you're buying a hybrid. How many miles would you really need to put on it to net $350 a month to cover the payments? I don't really know anything about Uber's payments to their drivers and finding unbiased information online is hard, so I really have no idea. You'd have to look at earnings per mile, though, because the easiest way to devastate a new car's resale value is to put noticeably more than the average number of miles per year on it. That's before accounting for actual maintenance costs due to wear and tear.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2016 22:29
|
|
|
If your plan to buy something you want is to run it into the ground just to pay for it then you really need a better plan
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2016 22:39
|
|
|
Lady Naga posted:Now where will I find my funny mashups Right? I'm feeling super disrupted right now
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2016 02:49
|
|
|
Panfilo posted:Also I hate to say it, but anything that keeps drunk drivers off the road helps other motorists in a small way. You know, you'd think it would, but they've done studies now that proves Uber doesn't reduce drunk driving. quote:Researchers at Oxford University and the University of Southern California who examined county-level data in the United States before and after the arrival of Uber and its competitors in those markets found that ride-sharing had no effect on drinking-related or holiday- and weekend-related fatalities. Also... Panfilo posted:That's why its only worth it if you're buying a hybrid. How many miles would you really need to put on it to net $350 a month to cover the payments? Even a hybrid wouldn't make it worth it. You're cutting the lifespan of your car in half with all the extra usage. Just like the lottery is a tax on people who can't do math, Uber is basically indentured servitude for people who can't calculate depreciation.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2016 06:16
|
|
|
e_angst posted:You know, you'd think it would, but they've done studies now that proves Uber doesn't reduce drunk driving. This seems pretty logical since taxis are a thing. Most people have always had alternatives to driving drunk, they just choose not to use them.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2016 09:27
|
|
|
Is there a website that does a corporate deathwatch (not just for tech)?
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2016 22:34
|
|
|
e_angst posted:You know, you'd think it would, but they've done studies now that proves Uber doesn't reduce drunk driving.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2016 22:39
|
|
|
Nono, you don't understand. App. APP
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2016 23:02
|
|
|
ThirdPartyView posted:Is there a website that does a corporate deathwatch (not just for tech)? (sniffles nostalgically) fuckedcompany dot com -- which swiftly became horrible, but was funny for awhile.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2016 23:07
|
|
|
cheese posted:Uber reducing drunk driving would only make sense if there were no other way to get home without driving before Uber. There have always been other ways to avoid driving your car drunk, from tipsy taxi's to designated drivers to just regular loving taxis, which are in every major city. Of course Uber doesn't reduce it. i think the argument was that uber increased access to "taxis" by making them cheaper and more reliable. but then again, when your company requires a debit/credit card to use then that kind of makes it out of reach to the poor by default
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2016 23:07
|
|
|
Uber almost certainly reduces drunk driving per amount of drinking, the same way adding any alternative transportation option would do so. Just not in a way that's statistically significant.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2016 23:18
|
|
|
I miss the halcyon days of "Well if you're driving to the airport already why not use Uber to get some extra $$$!"
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2016 23:42
|
|
|
Paradoxish posted:This seems pretty logical since taxis are a thing. Most people have always had alternatives to driving drunk, they just choose not to use them. The meat of of the issue is that if you don't have access to taxis in the first place, its unlikely that you have access to Uber. All Uber does is shift some of the drunk taxi-goers into drunk Uber-riders, so its not surprising that the numbers remain fixed.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2016 15:13
|
|
|
Paradoxish posted:This seems pretty logical since taxis are a thing. Most people have always had alternatives to driving drunk, they just choose not to use them. The result is surprising to me. Usually when you make something cheaper and more convenient (Uber is cheaper and more convenient than taxis) its use becomes more widespread. This argument gets used all of the time (maybe even by the same posters in this thread) in gun threads in D&D. The argument goes, even though there are many ways to commit suicide/commit violent crime, guns make it easier to do and so they increase suicide and violent crime rates. Again, this thread is bizarro D&D. An argument or principle which posters apply in other threads doesn't work here and the opposite is commonly accepted.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2016 17:16
|
|
|
silence_kit posted:The result is surprising to me. Usually when you make something cheaper and more convenient (Uber is cheaper and more convenient than taxis) its use becomes more widespread. It really shouldn't be surprising, cost and efficiency of the service are not the real reasons people choose to drive home drunk after the bar.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2016 17:28
|
|
|
silence_kit posted:The result is surprising to me. Usually when you make something cheaper and more convenient (Uber is cheaper and more convenient than taxis) its use becomes more widespread. Also, having used Uber during surge pricing times (aka late at night on a Friday/Sat night), I'm pretty sure its not cheaper than a taxi. cheese fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Aug 1, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2016 17:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 13:26 |
|
|
silence_kit posted:The result is surprising to me. Usually when you make something cheaper and more convenient (Uber is cheaper and more convenient than taxis) its use becomes more widespread. Ot maybe it is that the premise that Uber makes it easier or more convenient is largely untrue? Or as the results of that study indicate are statistically insignificant if it does exist. The fact is that in most major cities getting a taxi is as easy as hailing one or calling a dispatch. Uber did create an app but that requires one to have a phone and hands already so the increase in convenience is pretty minimal. The next aspect then is cost and with surge pricing during the peak hours (bar close) Uber really isn't cheaper than a taxi. And of course tipsy taxis are usually cheaper than either since they're run as a public service. So ya not surprising at all even with your dnd hive mind conspiracy. Raldikuk fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Aug 1, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2016 17:31
|
|
