[heartbeats]

It's unlikely that web3 will solve it; cryptocurrency already exists, and its many serious issues are not going to be solved by a fresh coat of paint or "moar adoption".

If you want an actual solution, look at FedNow. This would enable direct bank account payments, like in most of Europe, with a government-run intermediary in the place of MasterCard/VISA. This changes the censorship situation from "four out of four must accept" to "one out of thousands must accept".

[creshal]

The situation in Europe isn't quite as rosy. SEPA is a huge PITA, usability wise, and closer to US ACH transfers; and so most countries have their own special sauce online payment solution that serves as central point of failure for that country's customer base. Belgians use Bancontact, Austrians use EPS, Germans use giropay, Dutch use iDEAL, … or, more often, don't, and just use Paypal or credit cards anyway, since it's so much of a hassle.

And even if you wanted to implement all these systems, it's so much effort that you're back to relying on payment providers like Stripe, realistically.

[heartbeats]

SEPA isn't great, but there exist functioning country-wide systems as you mention.

> And even if you wanted to implement all these systems, it's so much effort that you're back to relying on payment providers like Stripe, realistically.

No. Payment providers like Stripe have to comply with the rules placed upon them by the card networks. If you only have to deal with European payment systems + FedNow, you don't have to worry about things like the MATCH list. This removes 95% of the censorship issues.

[rvz]

> If you want an actual solution, look at FedNow.

Fed No.

The US is not the world and the rest of the world is certainly not on FedNow, and never will be.

At least with stablecoins like USDC on Ethereum, Stellar, Solana, etc it is available today 'right now', worldwide, 24/7 and with instant, same day transfers with low fees.

[heartbeats]

And yet nobody uses them. I wonder if there's some reason for that?