I like how Visa/Master Card are shutting "indecent" games down, but have no fucking issues with twitter generating CSAM.
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Here in Czechia you can pay for online transactions with instant direct bank transfer, so cards are not really needed. This is often used for direct transfers between individuals where one generates a QR code on his phone and the other scans it.
That's because Europe has SEPA, which are used in the EU.
Europeans mind can't comprehend the issues of american banks.
They are so bad, it doesn't make any sense.
Europeans mind can’t comprehend the issues of american banks.
Still need an American credit card to rent a car tho
No you don't? What are you talking about?
Car rentals almost exclusively accept payment by credit card, unless you have a corporate account that is billed periodically.
I'm sure you can find an exception but please let's not fly off to nitpick land.
If you have an account in any European bank, you can pay by bank transfer or SEPA in basically any European business, and often it's their favourite way to do it because there is no commission. I don't know country by country, but in Germany the standard for payment system is Girocard which is German payment processing, and the cards usually come equipped with both it and some American standard like visa and mastercard, but a lot of people opt out, if they don't care about payment outside of Europe.
Any car rental worth it's salt in Europe will accept some form of SEPA, but also, renting a car is not an essential part of people's lives here, so it's not even something people care about that much
but also, renting a car is not an essential part of people’s lives here
It may not be part of your life, but I've done it hundreds of time as a travelling tech (plus a few as a tourist), and I've had times when airports with hundreds/thousands of rental cars had trouble satisfying demand, so it seems there are others with the same need.
And no, they don't accept SEPA, although terms vary by country, and if they do they require a safety deposit that can go from a few hundred euros to the thousands, not exactly practical.
Being traveling tech is absolutely not usual occupancy, so it doesn't change what I said. But if you work in Europe and traveling around, and moving around instruments is part of your job, you should have a company card anyway for it, so again, it doesn't really matter for the rest of Europeans.
What I'm trying to convey, that even though you will have some incompetence without American run banking systems, unless you're in a very specific operation, like needing to rent a car at an airport for example, you wouldn't be severely inconvenient.
I'm saying it as a refugee from a country that (for justifiable reasons) is getting some negativity around, and being born there I'm deemed not actually a good person in advance, and it took me a lot of time to convince various governments that I'm not a dangerous exemplar of my race. The time I spent without access to international banking systems like Visa weren't debilitating, even though inconvenient at times.
Being a travelling tech is fairly common, but even more common is being a sales rep or any other office worker that requires travelling. Who do you think takes the thousands of flights that go everyday between european airports, all tourists?
Not having access to those circuits IS a handicap, also because once you're outside the EU, they're your only option. But hey, if you people want to cover your ears and avoid listening, I will not waste any more time.
Being a traveling whatever and having to pay out of pocket for your transportation not only isn't common, a lot of the time it's illegal. And if your company setup that you pay first and get reimbursements later, you just ask your boss to issue you a company card since yours was taken away for trying to whistleblow, it's entirely not a big deal.
You're comming up with more and more contrived scenarios that are based on more and more improbable sets of circumstances that only work if you saw Europe on TV and imagined that it's like America but people talk in funny way.
Being a traveling whatever and having to pay out of pocket for your transportation not only isn’t common, a lot of the time it’s illegal.
who said I did?
You’re comming up with more and more contrived scenarios that are based on more and more improbable sets of circumstances that only work if you saw Europe on TV and imagined that it’s like America but people talk in funny way.
Idk, I relied my experience, but whatever, you're right, I don't know exactly what you're trying to prove, all I'm saying is that renting a car without a VISA/MasterCard is difficult, but whatever, you guys seem to have taken it as a matter of honour to prove me wrong, when actually recognising issues we have in the EU due to our dependency on the US seems way more productive to me, but yeah I'm tired of arguing with... you.
How is a deposit not practical? Unless they require it in cash that has to then at the end be picked up at the pickup point (which would be crazy)? A rental company is taking a huge risk by renting cars to any random person with a driving license. It's the same reason they don't typically rent to people below 25 (or without a higher deposit).
It's really only unpractical if you don't have enough money on your account to afford the deposit, but then why are you renting cars? Otherwise you just pay a bit more the first time and then get that money deposited back on your account when you return the car. There's basically no difference in the end other than a bigger number the first time, and if you wreck the car or something, you will lose the deposit through your credit card too.
How is a deposit not practical?
You need to have the money and manage it going back and forth, a credit card's CREDIT requires 0 management.
A rental company is taking a huge risk by renting cars to any random person with a driving license.
Yeah, that's why they like credit cards, they can guarantee a safety deposit HIGHER than your monthly withdrawal limit.
It’s really only unpractical if you don’t have enough money on your account to afford the deposit, but then why are you renting cars?
Let's say I'm poor, my car breaks down, I need to go to work otherwise I'll lose it, not everywhere has public transport options, I guess if I don't have an extra 1k€ on my account to pay for the deposit, I can get fucked, right? Shouldn't have been poor.
Let’s say I’m poor, my car breaks down, I need to go to work otherwise I’ll lose it, not everywhere has public transport options, I guess if I don’t have an extra 1k€ on my account to pay for the deposit, I can get fucked, right? Shouldn’t have been poor.
Shit americans say, I swear.
My man, if you rely on a car for work but your company doesn't provide you transportation, you're being exploited. If you live in the middle of the forest so there is no public transport around because squirrels keep chewing tram rails or whatever, but whatever your employer is paying you isn't covering your anti-squirrel measures, then again, you're being exploited. Contact your union rep, quit your job, find something normal. If you can't find anything, apply for one of a many government programs that will pay you stipend to learn skills that will allow you to start working for something other than whatever shady shit you did before.
But we're glaring over the most fun part of this all, the fact that I don't think there are places in Europe where you can rent a car from a renter that requires you to pay only with MasterVisa, but there is no public transportation around.
Add to this the fact that you talk about credit card as if it's normal to have one in Europe, and I am beginning to suspect that you don't actually know what you're talking about
Shit americans say, I swear.
Do you see the TLD on my instance?
long fucking tirade about whatever
look I like arguing just as much as the next person - no wait I don't! I don't even know why I'm arguing about this about people who don't want to listen, so whatever man, keep living in your fantasy land you're lucky enough to live in, I hope you never have to come out here with the dirties.
How are you getting a credit card in that last situation? You need a steady income and good credit that is able to pay the full credit at the end of the month to even apply for one. Which your hypothetical doesnt have....
And as the other person said, it's pretty ridiculous to go rent a car if you're in that situation because of how cheap and good public transportation is.
There's nothing you need to 'manage' about getting money back aside from checking your bank statement to make sure it went well. You would have to check that on your credit card statements too because deposit theft can happen just the same there too. But deposit theft is crazy uncommon to begin with.
And deposits are typically not 1k around here but like maybe 100-200 bucks at best, and on the lower end for your poor smuck example too.
My parents are not from the USA and don't have USA bank accounts or credit cards and have had no problems renting a car in Europe or anywhere else they went. I really don't get what you mean. I don't see why you specifically need an American card and not just a credit card from any modern country.
Eu banks typically use a MasterCard or Visa partnership for their credit cards. The EU bank might issue the credit card to their customer, but the actual payment processor is an american company. If MasterCard/visa starts blocking certain payments, then there's nothing that the EU bank can do about it.
You can know which payment processor your bank's credit cards uses by the presence of a small logo on the front of the card. 2 overlapping red and orange circles = mastercard network.
As for car rental companies, Hertz has some wonderfully twisted logic on their Belgian site where they say that they accept debet payments from any eu bank card, as long as the card has the visa or Mastercard logo. In other words, they only accept Mastercard or Visa payments, not eu debet payments.
I mean if you don't understand things you should ask, not assume others are in the wrong. Yeah it would be pretty stupid to be forced to have US accounts to rent cars in Europe, luckily we're not THAT stupid.
VISA and MasterCard are practically a monopoly on credit card circuits, your parents' cards may be issued by a local bank but there's a 95% chance they've got one of these two companies' logo printed on them, and out of every payment they make, these AMERICAN companies get 2% (blah blah cashback, blah blah terms and conditions), because they are made on their circuits!
You may also have debit cards that DON'T have those logos, but debit cards can't be used for car rentals.
If you don't believe this is an issue, here, read about how Francesca Albanese, despite being an Italian citizen living in Europe, can't own credit cards or open bank accounts, a punishment imposed on her by the US for reporting the Gaza genocide for the UN.
I did ask. Specifically I asked what you were talking about. All you really had to say was Visa and MasterCard are USA companies that handle card transactions. If you had clarified that initially you wouldn't be getting downvoted to hell.
you should ask, not assume others are in the wrong.
You also shouldn't assume that, maybe if you think others don't understand something, it's actually because you're wrong
I've literally rented cars in Greece using cash.
They do require some form of identification for obvious reasons, but that is about it.
None of the rental places required credit cards.
I think you are making too sweeping of a statement here. Maybe this is the case for car rentals you encounter / have access to but the response should show that's not the case everywhere in the EU. I rented a car without a credit card over 5 years ago where I'm from. You do pay a deposit that I suppose a credit card would normally insure for, but the option exists. Either way, if a car rental requires a credit card, I would not even consider renting with them. That's ridiculous.
Look, if you go to mom and pop's car rental, sure, they can accept hens as payment if they like. If you use car rentals the most common way, as a supplement for airport travel, you rent one in your city, you use it to go to the airport, return it, fly to your destination, rent another car at the airport, do your things, go back, repeat. At those locations you'll only have the big names, AVIS, Hertz, Europcar... Those are mostly credit-card or corporate account exclusive. And corporate accounts are expensive, at my former company we had a bunch of people travelling constantly and it still wasn't economically advantageous, apparently.
Also, you are just wrong about the big names you mentioned:
spoiler
Europcar
Debit Cards – Accepted in many countries, but restrictions apply (see below)
In some countries, only credit cards are accepted—unless you've prepaid online with a debit card. If you prepaid your rental with a debit card, you must bring the same card to the counter, along with a valid credit card for the deposit. Your card must be in the name of the main driver, and valid for the entire duration of the rental.
Mini and Economy class; debit or credit card;
FVMR; debit or credit card;
Passenger van (9 pers.); debit or credit card;
Van; cash, debit card, or credit card;
Your debit card is now welcome at Hertz in Europe. Here at Hertz we like to make renting a car personal. You decide what to drive and where to drive, and now you can choose how to pay.
We welcome debit cards across our European locations. We want your journey with us to be easy, so giving you options on how to pay puts you in the driving seat. No complicated processes – a simple deposit that works the same for credit cards as debit cards. Go your own way. Pay your own way.
Yeah, you just confirmed what I said:
Europcar: vague statement about countries, again WITH deposit.
AVIS: in the link it says mini car or van with debit AND deposit, otherwise credit.
Hertz: super vague, still asks for a deposit.
Look I'm tired of arguing, it seems that you've got that Reddit issue where you think you know more about something than those who regularly deal with that, so I'll tell you you're right, please go away.
Holy shit dude, you have a problem with accepting reality, not me 😂 The question was debit vs credit card, not deposit vs no deposit. I've never once said you need no deposit, you just made that up so you could say I'm wrong. And I also rent cars... your experience is no more valid than mine.
You never said your statement was just about airport car rentals. Over here that is very likely not the most common usage of rentals (and certainly if you exclude business travel and holidays), since airports are far between, but car rentals are all over the place, far away from those airports. You rent cars over here if you dont own a car and need transportation. Or if you have to move a large amount of items you rent a van.
Besides, you can simply take the bus or train from any airport to a real car rental which should be close by in any major city. Of course if you go do it in a business hub you will find scams for the average person. Does that sacrifice a little bit of convenience, sure. But if you buy all your water from street vendors at a tourist attraction we dont claim water is expensive.
I can see you are simply from a very different world, that of business travel, which is why your perspective is so different.
EDIT: And no, I didn't use a mom and pop shop, I used the biggest car renter in my country (Netherlands) with over 130 locations.
SEPA pertains only to EUR, Czechia uses CZK
No.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retail/sepa/html/index.en.html
SEPA not only includes non-Euro countries, it also includes non-EU countries.
EUR is a symbol for Euro currency. I could have made that clear.
That changes nothing.
How are you going to use it to transfer CZK?
Have you never used it?
Or cheched out the link?
Wtf
You can use SEPA transfer only when the transfer is in Euro (EUR) - the currency.
CZK is Czech Crown, official currency of Czech Republic,. It is not Euro.
What are you talking about?
It's been many years since I've had a CZK account, but I had no issues making payments to EUR countries?
So I have no idea what are you talking about.
in Poland we have something similar! we have BLIK and it generates a code for you that the other person taps into their terminal/you tap into an online purchase window, then it tells you to confirm again in the app and there you go, paid
there's also BLIK phone transfers, you just need the other person's phone number and (provided they have their bank linked to their phone number ofc) you can send money to their account that way
i haven't paid attention to it recently but when this was being introduced they also added a cheeky "this transaction only took you 30s ;)" at the end lol
Also if for some reason you really have to use cash, PaysafeCards are still an option.
Just grab one from a nearest vendor and the code on the reciept is tied to a balance starting with the amount on the card.
it was very confusing when I was given a qr code as an option to pay on a restaurant in Czechia 😂
I live in a country where it has become in a sense illegal not to be listed at an address. If you are not listed at an address, the government flags you as a missing person. If that happens, the banks lock you out of government ID, which is necessary to do basically any type of online banking, and if you have any funds behind an electronic ID wall, you won't be able to access them.
Wtf is the point of all that? Sounds like it just makes the life of homeless people harder for no reason
Which country?
Well this means that there is still a payment provider doing the barcode system. This payment provider could still block certain vendors. It works excellently to protect the privacy of the buyer, though.
I wonder where that puritan far right "women's rights" advocacy group is now that Twitter is generating CSAM and non consensual AI generated material, or maybe the purpose was always to punch down on independent artists.
They are actively pushing against every attempt to stop Twitter and it's owner Mask producing child pornography and non-consentually showing it to the users. That's where they are right now.
We now have the technological means to make online payments better in many ways for both customers and vendors. We just need to move away from one of the biggest American exports, middlemen.
I consulted for a luxury brand on e-commerce for a bit and I was surprised how important credit card splitting was to their American business.
Like, people splitting a purchase across multiple cards because they were so close to the max for each.
I questioned how much time we were spending on it but they assured me it was a common use case.
Note I recently had to do some gymnastics to split a purchase over 'credit cards' because I had received a few modest gift cards. I suspect that's an even more common case, since people want to completely use up a received gift card and that's all but impossible without splitting. Even if I have 10s of thousands of available limit, a gift card means I'm trying to spend like $50 or $100 out of a card.
I HATE gift cards. Kiddo got one for Nintendo. We have a hacked switch! Can't even use it.
Have a Home Depot one that says "invalid" or whatever wording, won't let me use it.
Basically buying a piece of plastic, they take your money and tell you to fuck off. No one's going to take them to court for $50, so it's win-win all around for them.
I did this ONCE on a $10k required purchase. Never again.
Interesting, usually when I get into something that expensive, they don't even want to accept credit cards. I think most I got someone to take as a credit card transaction was about $6,000. They'll only take check or certified check, or if a car then of course they really want you to borrow through whatever they have partnered with.
Visa/MasterCard is a tax in every transaction. You might not see it but it is there.
I hate that I don't get like a 2% cash discount, I get like 3%+ from credit cards so justifying cash is kind of hard
If you have bad credit you don't get perks like that. So addicts, poor people, anyone trying to turn their life around. This is a regressive tax.
At least in Denmark, paying cash was shown to be more expensive, due to the cost of money transportation services and the fee banks charge to provide bills and coins for the change in the register.
Also the stores can’t do any analytics on purchasing patterns on you when paying cash. So all in all they prefer credit cards or registering for membership programs for payments.
Recently visited a country where cash is very much preferred and it was such a breath of fresh air. I thought it would be annoying to have to keep up with the spare change and what not but it was fine and actually felt pretty good. I've since started using cash a lot more at home.
I recently had a trip to Japan and had more mixed opinions about it. Mainly because they have a large variety of coins and oh boy do you end up with a lot of them.
Coinage is the single reason why I'm tipped over the edge to prefer card. I HATE dealing with change.
I wish there was a card that was closer to cash where the money is stored on the physical card not offsite but that seems like a nightmare in itself... Idk
We actually had that here for a while, called Chipknip. You could store money on it which you would need top off once it was spent. It disappeared when nfc debet cards became the standard though.
debit card?
That's what I mean when I say card generally. Doesn't really help using debit instead of credit. If anything it's worse because if you get your money stolen you bank doesn't give a damn, whereas they will send a swat team if you use a credit card.
But both identify you just the same afaik...
oh boy do you end up with a lot of them.
You just need more practice with the Japan Coin Simulator ;)
https://wendal.itch.io/japanese-money-simulator
Theoretically the most coins you should ever have is 15:
4x 1 yen
1x 5 yen
4x 10 yen
1x 50 yen
4x 100 yen
1x 500 yen
Is 15 supposed to be not a lot?
It kind of is, but I love the 500 yen coin anyway. It's the 2nd most valuable common coin in the world (I think) after the 5 Swiss franc, (or at least it is for now as the yen continues to tank, currently worth about $3 USD whereas 10 years ago it was $4 and 15 years ago was over $6). It makes your change jar actually worth decent money (imagine if filling up a 2 liter bottle was worth a couple thousand bucks instead of a few hundred) and it's kinda fun to have a small change pouch in your pocket worth more than a hundred bucks.
Plus it's gold colored so you can collect a pile and feel like a pirate

On the flip side they also have the very low value 1 yen coin which feels like a cheap board game coin when you have it in your hand
Which country was it?
Having visited Greece (well, Corfu) a number of times, and as much as I love the place and the people, the primary reason they prefer cash is because they're not big fans of paying taxes.
Didn't they go through a whole thing where other countries were imposing shit on them to force repayments of national debt? Maybe understandable then that tax evasion is popular if a lot of what is paid in taxes isn't going towards improvements to your own country.
Well if they dislike taxes, they probably hate transaction fees even more.
It might have had something to do with people waiting in line to withdraw 60 euros too.
Makes me wonder: how are they not have the same stronghold in Europe? They're also everywhere there as well.
They do, but people also do a lot of bank transfers. Which is essentially a cash payment. But if you don't have a local bank account and app, or the Wise app, then credit cards work just fine most places.
Albania is the only place I've seen that has zero trust in anything but cash, but that's because their socialist era was so restrictive that after that regime fell, people were wholly unable to understand how basic things like banks or economics works. A single pyramid scheme basically crashed the government in 1996-97. It's a fascinating story about how much learning a society has to do to change from an oppressive regime to something else.
In the Netherlands we have iDeal, which will be turned into an European standard soon
The EU caps interchange fees iirc so its not as profitable for VISA. We did the same for debit cards in the USA which is why credit cards became even more pushed
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