Pix revolutionised the way we transact in Brazil. I've used Pix to pay for things that cost only cents, and I have a friend who bought her house using Pix. The system just works for any transfer amount. And it's so easy to use.
Its speed is truly baffling, and so is its reliability. Never have I failed to make a Pix payment because of downtime. I never cease to be amazed by how fast money arrives in my Brazilian account when I make a withdrawal directly from my EUR wallet on Wise. I receive a push notification from my Brazilian bank before Wise finishes running the animation of confirmation of withdrawal. It's like magic.
And it's so widespread that nowadays I don't even question whether someone accepts Pix. When I get in a taxi, no matter how old the driver is, it's certain that they take (and prefer) Pix.
I've even had homeless people ask me for Pix instead of change on multiple occasions.
> I receive a push notification from my Brazilian bank before Wise finishes running the animation of confirmation of withdrawal. It's like magic.
After I had to add a special animation for one email system so that user was sure that "the core functionality of encrypting" was indeed working (it took milliseconds in reality), your experience doesn't surprise me that much. But, in my "IoT" system we have a mix of devices. Our service can handle most requests in sub millisecond, but some devices (gprs) need at least minimum 1 second (20sec is still within time limit) to respond only because of slow connectivity. And then I have a parking ticket machines where you press button, wait 2 seconds, it beeps, then after 2sec it changes screen to "printing ticket", then after 2s you get the ticket, where everything can be a local action (free ticket without payment). Technology is wild.
Finance can be fast if wanted, and I don't think there' s a deliberate delay in Wise's animation.
In my country, we have a similar system, and before my bank sends me a push notification about the outgoing transfer, the push notification for incoming transfer pops up for most of the time. The delay between push notifications rarely goes above 2 seconds.
Ours has an upper limit to prevent abuse of the system, but you can't beat instant, actually.
The parking ticket machine might make things deliberately slow because the printer needs to warm up or something.
Maybe it needs up to 5 seconds to warm up if it's in deep sleep, so splitting this into three 2s periods provides the least frustrating user experience.
As soon as you need to deal with real hardware things always start to get complicated.
Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil - it's not even used in other Mercosur countries, what's the chance of having that adopted in other countries... And, that's problem #1.
How much do you trust your government with your money? A system like Pix don't stand a chance to get a worldwide adoption - maybe people are naive but governments won't unify to adopt a common system controlled by just a single entity / country.
What we may however end up with, are dozens of systems like Pix, one for each country, union, etc. Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant (see point 1)
80 countries have instant/real time payment systems today [1], and the Bank for International Settlements is working on cross border interoperability [2].
Cryptocurrencies will likely never go away, and will remain in use for certain use cases from a cross border value transfer perspective, similar to gold; either the token moves or the ownership is updated. More interesting is offering digital wallets for a single or basket of currencies to anyone you can remotely identity proof in the world (similar to nsave [3]).
You have bizarre logic here. For example, in a topic discussed about GPUs, someone would say that it's not possible to run databases on GPUs, so GPUs don't have any chance of succeeding.
> How much do you trust your government with your money?
Do you trust crypto companies? Mt. Gox, FTX, Bybit…
Do you know that crypto companies must follow government rules, regulations, and laws? Russians were banned from using many crypto exchange platforms. China has strict rules for its citizens. You can buy and sell crypto in Brazil, but you must use only Brazilian reals.
Pix isn't global, but no one government person outside of Brazil can block this system.
MasterCard, Visa, Amex, and UnionPay work worldwide, but only a few countries regulate them, can block their usage, and can use data for tracking and statistics.
Pix is free to use, so no one needs to pay an additional "tax" to MasterCard and Visa (it's about 3%).
Google and Apple cannot say that if you want to pay, you must use only our devices.
> Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil
Now, try to buy ice cream from street vendors using any crypto coins.
Pix proposition is very valuable for governments, as it is the best way of controlling transactions, inside the country and cross-border.
To you second point, I think the pix penetration/popularity proves that the majority of the people trust the government for that. There are 2 key reasons for its success: It was mandatory for Banks to adhere to the system and there are no fees for using it.
Once multiple countries have their own PIX, they just need to build a federation structure to connect them and allow cross-border transactions.
Crypto-currencies have their place with people who don't trust the government, want to speculate and/or simply want to do tax evasion, but they are not and probably never will be mainstream as a transaction medium.
> How much do you trust your government with your money?
When you use Pix, your money is not in custody of the government. The money goes to/comes from a standard commercial bank, just like a wire transfer. What the government (Central Bank) does is just the infrastructure for moving money between bank accounts.
The point about not being a global standard is valid, though. Although there are initiatives in progress to connect similar instant payment systems from different countries as other users have noted.
Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error.
Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant
And somehow less relevant than cash.
I can take cash from any country in the world to my local bank, and deposit it into my account. I can get a dozen different foreign currencies at my local branch in minutes, and almost any other currency in the world can be delivered to me by FedEx the next morning for a flat $10 fee.
I can take cash to any other country in the world and get it converted into the local currency, whether that's paper or digital in almost any city.
Crypto is great if you do a very few, very specific things in a vanishingly small number of places. But if I'd tied my finances to crypto instead of cash, I'd have been stuck many times in foreign lands.
> How much do you trust your government with your money?
Money is (for the purposes of this conversation) created and guaranteed by the government, and regulated by law, so I think it’s a little weird to not trust the government with my money.
How are you paying for a cab with crypto while travelling? For international payments, cards like Wise is simple and it works. You raised question about currency and the govt that manages it. The same question is true for most crypto as well; extreme volatility is not good for a currency.
You can pay with Pix in Paraguay since the largest privately owned payment processor implemented it and it's available within all payment terminals (POS) across the country.
The government of Paraguay also runs a similarly good system called SIPAP, that is replacing card payments because it's faster and free to use.
Actually, you can find "pix accepted here" in shops/exchanges in neighboring countries. It's probably more wide spread near the border. Similar to east Asia, were alipat/wechat is widely accepted in areas flooded with Chinese tourists
> How much do you trust your government with your money?
Eh, the money was printed by government and any value it has is based on how much people trust their government. Using government payment processor is small potato compared to those...
Cryptocurrencies will always be relevant for people show any to exploit others by moving money across borders in ways that governments can’t control (e.g., organized transnational cyber criminal gangs).
> How much do you trust your government with your money?
The money that they issue? Your question is radically flawed.
That aside your main point is that crypto continues to be as relevant in cross jurisdiction payments even after the introduction of a pix like system of payments in each country.
Crypto transaction volumes across all crypto currencies are so low compared to FOREX in any of the worlds currencies (even relatively unused ones - currency speculators still drive transactions even there) that it’s basically irrelevant today in this use case. So your argument becomes it’s irrelevant today and will continue to be tomorrow.
If you’re to express the volume of all crypto transactions, not just those for the purpose of international transaction, just everything in all crypto currencies. The daily volume compared to transactions in all the other non crypto currencies ends up looking like a homeopathic dilution ratio, 0.00000000000000…%
>How much do you trust your government with your money?
Well I'm in Canada, I would trust the govt and the banks with my money before I trust anyone else (yes yes, trucker protest bullshit still didn't shake my confidence)
Which is ultimately the problem. The govt and well regulated banks are the only ones you should be able to trust, but in many case you can't trust governments or their ability to regulate things.
If you don't trust your government then you don't own anything, since it's the government that enforces and arbiters property rights. The fact that you own a home is only written on some piece of paper and you trust the government to enforce it.
Crypto is only worth something because you can convert it to fiat and with that fiat can sign fiat denominated contracts that are enforced by the government.
Can we just agree that a system where every user/member needs to keep a large if not the entirety of the history of transactions is never going to work well?
Fine keep using crypto as a store of “value” but as a way to handle day to day transactions it has failed.
>How much do you trust your government with your money?
Sowing or stirring up doubt or implicitly initiating a conspiracy means you don't have an argument for crypto.
Bitcoin can never be a Pix replacement. It's too damn slow, and others have pointed out, having to manage the entire transaction history is just stupid. (A end customer might not have to do serious book keeping on transaction history, but companies would.)
Pix works great for Brazil. That's what it was intended to do. And that's what it does. Case-closed.
> How much do you trust your government with your money?
I cannot fathom the reasoning that would lead you to believe this question is a big gotcha.
The value of any currency comes from the trust in the economy and military of the governments that stand behind it. The USD's value is backed by the economy and military of the United States. The Euro's value is backed by the economy and military of the Eurozone countries. If you live in the US and the economy collapses to the point the USD loses its value, the value of the USD will be your least concern - same if the US were invaded by a hostile military force and unable to defend itself.
Your currency is literally backed by your country. Your country issues the currency and your country sets the rules for how much additional currency banks can conjure into existence. Whether you use that currency in cash, bank transactions or payment systems doesn't affect that point. Cash is the only one of the three that's meaningfully different in that it allows the physical transfer of money without a "paper trail" because you can exchange it for goods and services directly (which doesn't apply to e.g. handing over keys to crypto wallets as part of a transaction because you can't move the balance off the wallet without leaving a digital trail).
There is no inherent value in cryptocurrencies just as there is no inherent value in state-backed currencies. The value of cryptocurrencies primarily hinges on their use as a speculative investment - even stocks or futures have a more concrete value basis (representing ownership of parts of a company and future ownership of trade goods respectively). This means its value is not tied to the performance or power of any one state but it also makes the value much more volatile and unreliable and much easier to manipulate.
Cryptocurrencies also stil rely on trust: for most cryptocurrencies you have to trust the people who issued it (and in some cases the underlying code), given how many have suffered from "rug pulls" and pump-and-dump schemes before. For currencies like BTC you also have to trust that no single actor can be able to perform a 51% attack. For currencies like ETH, you have to trust the smart contracts that might be involved (and have been exploited/abused before). Most people also rely on third party services to actually trade crypto currencies, so they need to trust those as well and there have been plenty of scams involving them even where they didn't turn out to be unreliable outright.
All currency is vulnerable to manipulation by agents with control over disproportionate amounts of it - billionaires, megacorps, banks, states using it as a reserve currency, etc. But non-cypto currencies suppress some of that control with their own and they have a symbiotic relationship with their currencies (i.e. if the USD does badly, that affects the US economy, which affects the US government budget, which affects its ability to maintain its institutitions including the military).
So the question then is not how much do you trust your government but do you trust your government more than the wealthiest other actors (domestic and foreign) that would exercise influence over the currency in its absence. Given that the state is not only the only thing enforcing the idea of property rights but also able to take everything away (including your physical freedom and life) from anyone who lives in its sphere of direct influence, even if you distrust your government more it's a moot point unless you also have the ability to flee it at a moment's notice if necessary - and I'd wager that's not the case for the overwhelming majority of people.
You say we may end up with systems like Pix for each country/union - sure but there's no reason there can't be interoperability between them the way there is with SWIFT transactions. At the moment Brazil seems to offer Pix International and Pix Roaming to open the system up to tourists and Brazilians travelling abroad but there's no reason similar systems can't develop a standard for direct compatibility without having to require support by each foreign bank or POS system.
Does it work internationally? Does it send USD as well, or only the real?
If it solves th same problems, why is Brazil considering banning self-custodial USD stablecoins? And why has there been an ongoing discussion about launching mBRL, and stablecoin pegged to the real?
Does crypto? You may have heard of this thing called "tariffs" lately. Even purchases of software licenses are tariffed in Brazil[1]. The average person purchasing goods with crypto is just going to ignore this and several similar laws.
If you say crypto works to transact internationally, keep in mind: so does TF2 hats.
Only real afaik, although there have been some thoughts to integrating some neighbours to the system. Right afaik it works in shops popular with Brazilian tourists in the Southern Cone through some workarounds.
I was expecting China to be totally cashless when I went last year. While everyone accepts digital payments, almost everyone also accepts cash just fine.
I wish the homeless in London did this, I'd happily give a few pounds here and there if it were easy to. Back when I had cash on me at all times, I would think nothing of it, just toss a coin. Now in our cashless society, I found myself at a loss to do anything about the people suffering in front of me
The world needs to implement Pix. I truly believe that is a system which can replace SWIFT with just a intermediary, with a virtual currency that exchange rate between the 2 countries in the operation, this way the world can have a freedom outside dollar and really fast transactions.
Here in Sweden we have Swish which seems to be very similar (just send money to anyone with a phone number/QR Code), but Swish is a private company, not government.
Relatedly, most company payments here, including water/electricity/etc bills, are paid using a system called Bankgiro, which is also a private company (and you can pay Bankgiro bills using Swish, of course).
And even the de facto national electronic identity system, BankID, is developed and provided by a private company. It is used to login to your bank as well as most government systems and any company can use it for login (which most Swedish companies do).
So, it differs from the Brazilian model in that all services are provided by private companies, not by the Government. Not sure which is better, to be honest. On the one hand it's hard to trust a Government like the Brazilian one given its history... on the other hand, trusting a private company even for public services seems wild: what if they go bankrupt, get sold to foreign investors, started using shady business practices??
I'd hate to see a system like that where I live, because the government will abuse it. We've already seen Canada freeze bank accounts of protestors, and US officials put protestors on the no fly list.
While I agree cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance, my experience with qr systems has been a mixed bag. The country I live in has a fairly good qr code payment system. But there was one day when the largest bank went down and that was chaos (cash very much has a role to play). We also supposedly have linkage with India's UPI. Unfortunately, it was impossible for me to actually use that linkage thanks to the way upi works (I think only some subset of banks are supported).
In the case of Brazil, besides QR codes, you can also make payments using the user unique key, which can be its phone number, social security number, email or a random generated key.
QR codes are problematic. First of all, you can’t really verify it with your naked eye. It can take you to a fake site that looks just like the original. Using phone numbers is vastly superior.
I've been saying for over a decade that crypto makes no sense for micropayments and the only reason traditional methods don't work is because they are run by rent-seeking middlemen like VISA.
Watching the Indian and Brazillian governements solve this problem by by building the payment networks themselves and removing the profit incentive has felt vindicating.
You're far too optimistic. The current administration is trying to work itself out of a major economic crisis and there's nothing they would like more than to tax the crap out of every single Pix transaction.
I wish we could make a comparison with Indian payment system calld UPI. I feel both are similar and I wish if we could know and compre all such govt run initiatives. UPI is Indian govt initiative and very reliable
UPI is great in terms of UX, but I don’t think it’s super reliable – especially big public banks go down all the time. The UPI base service had multiple incidents in the last 1 month too.
- technically not a specific app, its a payment method that any app with a checkout flow (for example) can chose to implement.
- you register some id with your financial institution of choice (any of CPF - equivalent to SSN, CNPJ - for businesses, phone number, email or a randomly generated key).
- keys are fully portable, as in you can revoke em or change the bank institution they're associated with any time.
- you can generate a QR code on the spot so the person paying can just scan it
- transfer is pretty much instant (under 5s seems to be the norm)
- no NFC (so works with any crappy phone)
- since its a bank transfer, and since bank transfers are insured up to 200k (afaik), its pretty safe.
Pix is basically a commercial name for two services:
- SPI: responsible for the payments
- DICT: responsible for mapping keys to accounts
The API documentation of those services are available, but only banks can use them. When a person wants to send money to another, there's an option in the bank app for sending through Pix.
Then you have many options to define to whom you'll send that money:
- typing the bank account information
- using the Pix key (which can be an phone, email, CPF/CNPJ (brazillian documents) or a generated key)
- scanning a QR code
Note that the two latter options don't require the account information. That resolution is done by DICT.
After that, you type how much you'll send (sometimes the QR code already contains this information). Then it'll send through SPI.
You use your bank's phone app. You can scan a QR code or you can send money to someone if you know their "id string", like a phone number, an email or a random string of numbers - you choose the "id string" format you want, and you can have different "ids" linked to different bank accounts. There are no physical cards.
You can have several unique keys, a few are unique to the whole system (like your phone number, Physical Persons Register (CPF)), but you can have several randomly generated per bank. Usually you tell someone your phone number, otherwise the random generated string is a big string, and you actually show them a QR code so they can transfer to your account, and vice-versa.
It's a functionality of banking apps. Yes, transfers are done either via a QR code or via one or more "Pix Keys", that the person/bussiness authorizes in their baking app. These keys can be the brazilian equivalent of your SSN, a cell phone number, an e-mail address or a randomly generated UUID-formated one.
You don't need a permanent residence, but to use PIX you have to get an ID called CPF. This is your IRS number, as you said, tax number. It's easy to get but it takes time, you can have one as national from different country.
Pix sounds great for most people and probably a good replacement for government issued paper notes and metal coins. But, the crypto purists like crypto that is not controlled by the government or the banks. Pix would obviously fail at attracting those crypto fans.
and the transaction size limits is also too low, for me (I think you can send multiple in quick succession though)
to avoid random fintech platform and bank scrutiny for normal transactions and the higher scrutiny given to international transfers, I've used crypto for over a decade. For investment, to pay or be paid by vendors in other countries. Places where paypal/wise/revolute/n26 will flag, hold, or western union was the only option. This hasn't changed in that decade, only more onramps and offramps for crypto has changed for more proliferation.
once our crypto is within our respective domestic jurisdictions, cashing out typically has an extremely fast, non-scrutinized option, similar in speed to Pix
another comment mentioned that the Bank of International Settlements is working on instant cross border transactions, I suspect the scrutiny and transaction size limits will remain inferior to the unlimited size that crypto provides, and lack of scrutiny that a transaction converted to a domestic transaction will provide.
Been using stablecoins for a decade and the transaction costs have dropped as blockspace has become more abundant, and the stablecoin issuers create and redeem for free.
there is also the benefit of not needing the domestic currency or banking rails, since the crypto ecosystem has many investment options for different risk profiles, and many vendors to pay for goods and services.
It is very common that people do not find this competitive because they aren't aware they have a problem, or don't have a problem. But many people do encounter a friction once they branch out into another industry to try to change their circumstances, or earn larger amounts. That attracts enough people to crypto.
I don't understand the willingness of the masses to willingly give governments complete access to all of their transaction data. At least in the U.S. bank transactions are feebly masked by institutions. I have no doubt the government gets bank transaction data, but with Pix, it's just making it even easier to monitor what you're doing. Is it that the transparency makes it feel good? No middleman selling it or giving the facade of private transactions?
I do not see how this is better than cryptocurrency, which, while not fully anonymous aside from Monero, is at least decentralized.
"Is the government spying on me?" tends to be a concern that is secondary to things like "Am I getting paid?" and "Can I buy groceries?"
Technologists repeatedly get this wrong. The best money system is the one that lets me buy groceries in exchange for working, not the one that's cryptographically unbreakable. Unless I'm running an illegal internet-based drug empire, in which case, the ones that aren't cryptographically unbreakable are disqualified, since I'd need the government to not be able to trace the money flow in my illegal drug empire. But even real illegal drug empires that are not internet-based mostly use government-issued currency, with measures taken to hinder tracing!
Well, unlike cryptocurrency, it works reliably and quickly, does not require you to manage your own keys, and provides recourse if things go wrong. Those are pretty strong points in its favour.
Are you worried about the power the central bank has?
What if they deny service to or apprehend the assets of people they politically dislike? Also couldn't they crush any hope of anyone's profitable business? Could a person or business function without it? What about in ten years?
What if they track people by their transaction and built profiles of them? They could essentially make it too dangerous to do business to people who are disliked.
I don’t know why you’ve been downvoted. In fact in Brazil people got their financial operations restricted for expressing their opinions on the internet. Pix is an authoritarian government wet dream.
Interestig, but this is also worrying to know that the government now knows exactly what you bought, where, when, and for how much. They can also (if there's a rogue government) create fake transactions to implicate you in things you haven't done
Is it much more worrying than having Visa being able to do that? Especially when you see how the US is going downhill, I think it'd rather take the risk of having to deal with hypothetical local fascist state.
A lot of governments have that ability for electronic transactions. In Brazils case specifically it was implemented as a payment broker between institutions that participate in the SPI (instantaneous payment system) and works pretty much like any other inter bank transfer system. It is also possible to use the system semi-anonymously by using a "non bank" participant that will broker the transaction for you using random keys. Which would mean not even your bank account no gets exposed, because its not used.
As far as I can tell the legal landscape of the solution currently only allow the actual government to look at the data with the standard court orders. I believe not even the 10k report limit is applied to pix atm the same way as the other methods.
Regarding fake transactions, that would be a non concern to me, the system is only centralised in parts, the banks still hold most of the data so they would have to collaborate on this potentially leaving lots of evidence behind. Governments do not need to be subtle to screw you over, see current US deportation news.
Its not that much different than how bank transfers in Europe work in practice. The US is particularly archaic in banking technology available to the public.
> this is also worrying to know that the government now knows exactly what you bought, where, when, and for how much
As a citizen of a still kind-of-functioning democracy, I'd happily make the trade if that means Apple, Google, Visa or Mastercard don't have the information anymore.
There is virtually no difference with a private entity which can be compelled by the government to do the same, plus has its own profit motive which could also create incentive to do it.
There must be a non-repudiation and integrity check to verify transactions (e.g., in Estonia I sign digitally all my transactions), so the latter problem is easier to mitigate.
In a sense it didn't change much. It's not like the government can access your transaction data all the time. They still need to go to court and request a warrant for that, to break your bank secrecy.
It's not different from what we had before.
EDIT: it didn't actually change a thing. Banks are still required to maintain transaction data private, and agencies, including the government, MUST obtain a warrant to break transaction data secrecy.
Brazil has an insane level of financial fraud and tax evasion. Pix mitigates some of that, but at the cost of privacy - something that Brazilians do not care too much about.
If you pay with Google Wallet or Apple Pay it's a corporation what you bought, when and where. And since Google knows your location and has access to your mail, social media and everything on your phone, they can connect more dots.
That's why central bank digital currencies are the way to go - same amount of trust as the (real) base currency and near-cash-level privacy (modulo implementation details)
Any half competent government can always create fake transactions to implicate people, whether it’s a paper or electronic (government currency) transaction.
Have you had any significant issues with scams? In my home country we have a huge problem of scammers calling and tricking elderly people to transfer their savings with a similar instant payment app.
Scams are a social problem that can't be solved with technology alone. That said, Pix includes several features to help mitigate them:
The recipient's name and part of their ID are displayed on the confirmation page. This allows you to verify their identity, as the name must be linked to a real ID.
Users must set transaction and daily limits, with any changes taking effect only after 24–48 hours.People are encouraged to maintain lower limits.
Since transactions are tied to real individuals, it becomes easier for law enforcement to track down the recipient after a scam is identified.
> I've been living in Brazil for the last 20 years.
> Cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance.
Yeah, if you enjoy having your money one hundred percent controlled by the brazilian government. I can't think of a more frightening proposition. You do realize this is the country that once suddenly confiscated everybody's money directly from their bank accounts, right?
Why did they do that? Runaway inflation. Just like its fellow latin american neighbors, Brazil has mismanaged all of its currencies and it will inflate the real to zero just like all the others, it's merely a matter of time. Just look at the country's economic situation. BRL is an absolute garbage currency. Why would you even want to hold onto this crap? You're better off holding USD if you can. You're better off holding real property if you've got the capital. You're better off holding bitcoins.
Cryptocurrency? They're basically the light at the end of the tunnel. You say you've lived here 20 years. Surely you know that judges are basically gods in this country. And we have judges admitting in writing that it's essentially impossible for them to seize or in any way touch your bitcoins without your secret keys. Do you seriously believe they have no chance? In this place? They're basically the solution to nearly every single problem in the "government is stupid" category.
Surely you know that the brazilian government sucks at pretty much everything except taxing you. And you're advocating for a system that essentially implements nation wide financial surveillance. Because our number one priority is to make taxation of an already heavily taxed people even more efficient, right? So that the politicians and judge kings can enjoy their world tours on tax payer money?
Pix is very convenient. That's all it is, and unfortunately that's all it needs to be to win the hearts of people. People won't be smiling after the government starts blocking their Pix keys for arbitrary reasons, preventing them from participating in society.
If you're thinking worst-case scenarios - what about if the government simply puts you in a cell and beats you until you give them your crypto keys?
The only hope for any system is if the people fight to not live within these kinds of fascist states. Crypto is not some magic solution - and has a lot of downsides which are mentioned often.
It might be valuable for a minority of people, but it is an active detriment for most. I want to know where my money is going, and I want my bank to be able to get it back in case of theft or fraud.
Is it safe? I'm pretty sure everyone not carrying cash is very good for physical safety, but can someone be coerced into emptying their bank account at knifepoint?
Given the dimension of Pix, I never heard of someone losing money directly because of using it (for example, here in the past was common to see where credit cards were cloned)
> can someone be coerced into emptying their bank account at knifepoint?
There are limits of use. Banks have different settings for limiting the amount of money that will be transferred in different situations, like when using their apps outside a trusted network, at night, etc
> Are there scams?
Just like any other payment method. I dare say that it is even safer, as some banks (e.g. Nubank) alerts if you are trying to transfer money to a suspect account.
> Can stolen money be retrieved?
Perhaps if you contact the bank, but as far as I know it is not a feature :-(
Presumably it has the same simple safeguards that a US system like Zelle or Venmo have. I needed to pay my sister-in-law $1300 the other day, and forgot that I have a $500/day transaction limit in place for such transfers, at my own choosing (setup when I opened the account).
That’s true for the moment, specially because you’d need an agreement between both countries.
But payment processors in Brazil are already offering “international pix”, that Brazilians can use to pay foreign companies. It’s the same experience as pix for the customer but behind the scenes the company deals with the cross border payment.
No reason it couldn't. Bizum (mobile payments in Spain) started with just Spain but can now be used for payments across & to/from Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Andorra.
Bizum is also a member of European Mobile Payment Systems Association which I think will eventually lead to all members being able to make transfers to other members, but that might a somewhat dream rather than actual reality today.
A more apt description would be it doesn't currently do it, there is no technical limitation. You can send cents across borders just fine with Wise and others without any fuss.
Love that you tell us how amazing the government run digital currency but end it with a throw away statement about how the open source version will never "stand a chance". Just like how no one uses Linux and Firefox died 20 years ago.
It’s truly remarkable and makes any interaction with a US-based payment system look ancient in comparison. One to two business days to make an ACH? Ugh, please. People still using paper checks? Get with the times.
>>I've been living in Brazil for the last 20 years.
Lucky you. I've been living here since i was born. :(
Pix is surreal. It was launched in the Bolsonaro (mal)administration, designed by the proverbially incompetent public work force, and is as Orwellian as can be. Its code is nowhere to be found.
The funniest thing is that is has been adopted feverishly by the rabid right wing crazies, the same lot who want to destroy everything 'government'.
I take pleasure in listing three of the problems:
1. Lack of Transparency
2. Potential for Abuse
A government-controlled payment system centrally-controlled, with no auditability? Oh please give me more (/s)
Correcting the blatant misinformation about the topic:
- PIX project started in 2016, public launch in 2020
- It was not "launched" by any President; the Brazilian Central Bank is an independent authority, with it own mandate, not a branch of the executive power
- PIX was co-developed with institutions of the financial sector
- It's a protocol that participants must implement, not an app. The specification is even on GitHub. I don't know what you mean by "its code is nowhere to be found".
- The Brazilian Central Bank is acknowledged as a benchmark, rather than "proverbially incompetent public work force"
> I've been living in Brazil for the last 20 years.
If you have moved about 15 years before that, you'd have experienced the hyperinflation years and you've come to understand why Brazilian (retail) banking systems were always pushing the state of the art.
(You'd also understand that cryptocurrencies are not meant to compete with payment networks that have institutional backing, but that's a lesson for another day)
I'm thinking, maybe controversially, centralized national payment service like this should be government-run based on my experience with Alipay which is a digital payment service in China.
Due to it's commercial origin, Alipay is filled with unwanted ads and traps. Almost every time I made a payment with it, a pop up prompts me to enlist their Ant Financial LOAN service either now, or being prompted for the same question again 30 days later (yep, not Yes or No, but Now or Later). It's just fucking ridiculous, I don't need a LOAN for a $400 projector, and I don't need a LOAN for a $4 hair cut (Xi should probably do something about it, really).
I'm glad that at least people of Brazil don't have to suffer that kind of shit. At least their government-run program is better scrutinized and boring, thus more dependable, that's a good thing in my eyes.
> I'm thinking, maybe controversially, centralized national payment service like this should be government-run based on my experience with Alipay which is a digital payment service in China.
After dealing with many private sector services, I think a lot of things should be government run.
For instance: weather apps. Private sector ones are just a vector to track and sell your location data, and they rely on government data anyway. It'd be much better the government roll out an API and an app that uses it, so you can avoid the private sector altogether.
100% this. My (BR) state have a weather service¹, it's amazing. What people don't realize, it's that the service isn't just made for normal people see if is gonna rain, it's that the service is fundamental for agriculture and farmers. So they have radars, frosts alerts, specifically tailored to farmers as well.
It's also used to give alerts to electricity companies, etc...
Their weather prediction, it's just way better than any other service.
There's also national service, run by CPTEC/INMET, but they are lacking funding IMO...
I'm in NZ and actually prefer the Norwegian Govt weather site www.yr.no, which is about as accurate as our local one, easier to use and has no adverts.
This is exactly what has been playing out in the Netherlands the past couple of months: the weather institute (KNMI) released their own weather app that is functionally the same (in some cases superior) as the commercial apps that want your consent to track and serve ads.
I believe in Germany the national weather service in fact rolled out such an app, but was then stopped by a court because this counted as unfair competition with private entities.
Switzerland has this for weather - government data, projections up to a week in advance. Of course no ads, tons of info ie on PM2.5, pollen, avalanche risk in mountains etc.
> For instance: weather apps. Private sector ones are just a vector to track and sell your location data, and they rely on government data anyway.
Or you do it like we do here in Germany and take the dumbest route you can imagine.
We had a very well working publicly funded weather app from DWD (Deutscher Wetter Dienst). The primarily purpose of this app was to warn from extreme weather conditions, but it also included an ad free (because publicly funded) and rather accurate forecast.
Then a private entity sued claiming that the DWD app also providing weather information is unfair competition for private competitors. The won in court and now the publicly funded DWD app has a paywall for a previously free feature.
In the US your weather app is effectively government run.
Your iPhone skins the government data and makes it pretty. Nobody is selling your location or information. And you can always get the data directly if you want.
In UPI (similar Indian system), govt backed system acts as a central conduit between apps, banks, payment service system. So, the user can easily switch apps/banks. This prevents any hard monopoly but ensures competition and innovations at all levels.
payment services should absolutely have a public option, as should many other basic eservices like email, mychart, etc. the issue is that our government in particular is incompetent, has legal difficulty hiring for merit, and has public sector unions (which is effectively empowering people to negotiate against the collective democratic will of the people).
i’ve worked on internet projects with the feds before, basically the current iteration of the federal government does not really seem capable of doing these things because of how the rank-and-file is structured.
i think it would also be important to make sure that control over payment isn’t abused. i recall when donations to wikileaks were effectively blocked by public/private coordination. presumably that would be even easier if it just required public action.
> the issue is that our government in particular is incompetent
Our federal government is huge and our state governments are small. Precisely the opposite of how the founders configured it. This is part of the problem.
The states need to band together and develop a cooperative solution and then push it upwards to the federal level.
This is a lot easier than centralized planning and management of an entity the size and scope of the US. We have a lot of offshore territories and two states. This complicates things more than people care to admit.
Well, Pix is not free from those too... Besides being operated by the Central Bank, you still have to use your commercial bank account to send/receive money and, even though the Central Bank do require some minimum UX implementation standards, banks can still show messages offering lending services before you finish the transaction. So you also get banks already offer some kind of instant micro-loan even for small Pix transactions, just as you described.
At least most aren't as intrusive as Alipay, but they do exist.
Unfortunately, the incentives for bad UX and privacy violations are too great for companies to behave when given the opportunity. It’ll always be a race to the bottom if not done by the government.
Some services, like payment, are most convenient when done by a monopoly. It makes sense to have them blessed by the govt. They could be govt run or regulated monopolies or have the rights to operate the monopoly bid for by competing companies.
Why is it that apps in the US are not as (overtly) commercialized or gamified (like Temu) as some of their chinese-counterparts? Is american culture just less tolerant of it? You would think there is more profit to be made by doing so which would be very capitalistic in a sense.
Hm, the problem is that a little over half of all politicians are ideologically opposed to the government running anything (the reason your comment felt "controversial", I suspect). Id hate to come to depend on it and always be one election away from it falling apart.
I can't say I have a good alternative. The co-op model works for supermarkets on an international scale, and for banks on a national scale (I am unaware of any international co-op banks). I wonder if it could work for payments.
Until you say something the government doesn't like and they decide that part of your punishment should be lack of access to payment services.
I'd prefer a constitutional mandate or guarantee that this can't happen. Without it this is a noose. A convenient noose with lots of nice properties but a noose none the less.
> Until you say something the government doesn't like and they decide that part of your punishment should be lack of access to payment services.
How much worse is that than the same thing happening when you do something a private company doesn't like?
And how much different is that than what the Federal government could already do? If the government says you're a terrorist, you're not accessing any banking.
I don't think it is a realistic option in the US, at least in the current climate.
There are so many powerful and influential anti/small-government that are rabidly opposing anything made by the government, and offered to the people.
The argument is always the same:
- "It will stifle innovation"
- "It is unfair to business"
- "It will make people dependent on the government"
- "It will give government more access to spy on the citizens"
and the list goes on.
For decades the American people have been told that anything the government touches will be expensive, inefficient, and lead to a more taxes. Private sector knows best, and all that.
And it is especially bad right now. You had MAGA-influencers outright rejoicing that DOGE had laid off the 18F team, spreading the gospel that free (government-run) tax tools are an abomination.
i wish i was not sympathetic to those arguments - and i used to not be, but then i actually worked in the federal government. perhaps local governments can efficiently provision services but the feds are handicapped in so many different ways it would be quite challenging to untangle.
realistically, the workforce that was hired around sorting through hundreds of thousands of bureaucratic paper documents in the 70s/80s is not the same workforce that can really build new products and the feds are mostly the former.
>For decades the American people have been told that anything the government touches will be expensive, inefficient, and lead to a more taxes. Private sector knows best, and all that.
Payment systems take huge fees. It is always good if they get back to the country and not elsewhere. Digital paying is something fundamental. Like electricity.
Brazilian Pix is free though, at least for the time being. IMO the biggest thing is not the money behind it, but the ability to track individual payments. Even that, I prefer the government to have that information, than some shady owner of a private company
That is the monopoly cost. UPI is free for both payee and payer. Whatever it costs banks to operate it is covered by reduced cost of dealing with cash/consumer.
Fast, free, and frictionless payments allow the economy to run better. That's better for the government and the people. Only corporations like Visa and Mastercard lose.
That is such an inane opinion by the author. I wonder if he/she knows central banks can literally print money. Helping to move it around is nothing, and benefits everyone.
How so ? While it is P2P protocol, the network is pretty centralized.
UPI is owned by NPCI(gov entity) and runs on top of IMPS both the networks are strongly regulated by RBI the central bank.
There is fair amount of regulation and KYC/ AML requirements before an app/service gets direct access to the network and even then it can be pretty challenging. WhatsApp struggled for years to get UPI integration .
Holding money in a wallet has even more regulations than merely transferring it .
Payment networks tend to centralize by their nature. I see pix or UPI as competitor to Mastercard or VISA , they have proven it is possible to run a network far cheaper than claimed
You would think, but is it in practice? In the Netherlands (and I believe many/most other countries), practically all non-cash payments are handled by either Visa or Mastercard. Technically a duopoly, but that's not a huge improvement either.
Yet we, a developing "third-world" country, have a better functioning payment system than the US, where it takes days, or even weeks, for a wire transfer to land, and you pay a huge amount of fees for that.
Cases in point:
- To transfer money to a broker, I need to pay around $5 in transfer fees via ACH or wire
- I want to change the custody of my stock market assets from one broker to another, and it will cost me $75 to move $60 worth of shares. Meanwhile, in Brazil, this process is free in every broker.
This take is at best outdated and at worst disingenuous.
Brazil’s democracy was threatened by an actual authoritarian with oligarchical ties during Bolsonaro’s presidency, but its institutions resisted, and he was democratically removed. Now he, his minions, the aspiring oligarchs, and the insurrectionists who attempted their own “January 6th” are facing real consequences — including jail time.
You can’t say the same about the US and its actual oligarchs.
Where did you get this idea of a 'very corrupt authoritarian oligarchy'?
Brazil is not much different from any other democracy and is far less oligarchic than Trump's USA. Also, PIX is managed by our independent central bank."
It's funny but also worrying how much Americans underestimate the impact a centralized government can have on people's lives. That probably means that eventually it will happen there.
A centralized – often socialist – government is the _definition_ of monopoly, you can't escape from it without risking jail or worse. No U.S. monopoly, no matter how much you hate it, will get close to this, and you think it does, you are sincerely naive at least.
As a Brazilian - Pix was a pleasant surprise, especially in that for once it feels like we're not lagging behind. It's convenient, free, instant transfers across banks. You can also easily create or programmatically generate QR codes or pastable codes with preset receivers and amounts. Great UX all around, and it quickly became the de-facto standard in how people send money.
It's technically quite impressive - it's a large scale thing and it works really well. I can think of maybe one or two times in these years where I saw downtime, and in both cases it was working again after a few minutes. The usual experience with the government building technical solutions is to have something that makes little sense, is slow, and goes down frequently with even the most predictable usage peaks, but with Pix they really seem to have nailed it.
It does feel a bit weird to have so many payments go through the government's systems, and it definitely feels like it puts them in a position of having more information than they should. There's a lot of Orwellian surveillance potential there, as any transfers are necessarily tied to both users' real identities. I don't think there's a realistic way around this, though.
Another concern is that people can expose some of their information without necessarily being aware of it. You can register e.g. emails and phone numbers as Pix "keys", and then anyone can initiate a transfer to those keys and your full name will pop up so you can confirm or cancel the transfer. I've seen some clever advice around this - "When using a carpooling app (often details are arranged off the platform using WhatsApp), put the driver's phone number on Pix. If a name comes up and it doesn't match the name or gender of the driver's profile, something is up". Obviously though there's potential for misuse and I'm sure the vast majority of people don't think about this when registering their Pix keys. You can, however, just use randomly generated uuids as keys as well, a different one for each transaction if you so desire, so this one can be a non-issue with more awareness.
Overall though it's a very convenient thing which works surprisingly well, and the downsides are theoretical at this point. IMO it's a rare case of our government nailing something.
WhatsApp is omnipresent for communication in Brazil, and WhatsApp Pay was ready before Pix, but the government blocked the launch to launch Pix first.[1] I rarely see this mentioned.
WhatsApp Pay is available today in Brazil. The official reason for blocking the launch was missing paperwork, but word on the street at the time was that it was to favor Pix. This is all mentioned in the Retuers article. The reasons for favoring Pix are left for one to speculate. You say national security, the other says financial surveillance and control over the population. Time will tell.
These systems are not a direct alternative to Visa/Mastercard. They offer no credit and give no fraud protection and no way to revert transactions (ie you can never get your money back once you send it).
Although they can replace a lot (most?) of existing transactions that are currently done through credit cards, there is still a place for them.
> Tangentially related, I've heard talk of EU alternative to VISA and Mastercard, which I also believe is the right direction.
There is Wero, I guess similar to Pix as an alternative for instant payment like PayPal, but it's meant to be used with your bank account and not a lot of banks support it.
i hate this expansion of national security justification and securitization rhetoric - whether it is the US justifying tariffs or deportation or Brazilians justifying no fair play under the law or trying to jail presidential candidates.
It's an interesting topic for study. Being the first to launch wasn't the only factor, but certainly an important one - WhatsApp Pay is available today, but it's nowhere near as popular as Pix. That's why I mentioned it. With that being said, I don't think people need "saving" from choosing to use a service. It's not certain that WhatsApp Pay would really take off as much as Pix did. I also don't think one should be thankful for having one monopoly replaced by another (in the sense of market dominance, you can still use alternative payment methods). Imagine instead of WhatsApp Pay it was WhatsApp itself. Meta is no saint, but at least messages are E2E encrypted. How would GovApp look like? As mentioned in the article, Pix has every transaction go directly through the central bank, as opposed to going through commercial banks like traditional payment methods. It may provide great usability, but also concentrates power and risk, as written in The Economist. So far there is no indication this power has been used in any malicious way, or that any significant breach occurred, but the infrastructure for that is there, and governments change. That should at least be in one's mind, if one values some kind of personal financial freedom.
Good to hear your words loyalty and patriotism, dear citizen! I will contact your local commissar and make sure he increases your social credit score by 5 points.
But we must also be realistic if we want to win against our eternal enemy Eastasia, and admit that Facebook coin would never be a monopoly because Visa, Mastercard and cash exist.
Same in India. WhatsApp wanted to use the payment system UPI but wasn't granted permission to do. Same reason I think - one app that handled all communication and all payments would have been too powerful.
Isn't that what any other payment system and most of the banks around the world are - a foreign company with billions of dollars in charge of payment system in a country.
VISA, Mastercard, HSBC, UnionPay, ICBC, Santander...
Or is this all Brazilian technology?
The difference is that Meta is privacy data hoarder, not that it's a foreign company. And it's not "in charge of countries payment system", because that's pretty-much impossible, but "one of the payment systems in the country".
actually, foreign capital and foreign investment is good - and fair play before the law facilitates that.
securitization and anti-globalization makes us all poorer, worse off, and more prone to conflict. lawfare is an addictive drug and can lead to serious outcomes, as history in Brazil shows any number of times - like even with the current president.
What people outside of Latin America don't realize that "they were missing some documentation" is just not true for companies of the size of Meta. They have the best lawyers in the world and I'm pretty sure they used them to prepare all the documentation for this big launch. "You're missing a document" means: we're just fucking around and not letting you in.
Given the fact that the central government uses taxes to fund the creation and managements of a countries currency, it makes perfect sense that in the digital age it should also be funding the infrastructure to send digital transactions with that currency. I wonder how differently the internet would have developed if microtransations were free and easy to transfer.
> Given the fact that the central government uses taxes to fund the creation and managements of a countries currency
That's not a fact, in fact it's typically the other way round, issuing a currency is generally profitable and the profits typically flow into the general government budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage It's managed by the central bank, though, btw, which is considered separate from the government for governance reasons.
Of course, none of that stands in the way of creating public payments infrastructure.
they do physically print the money (at some cost) . And they can easily generate revenue from a payments system, if they want to (which they will at some point, of course)
Creating digital currency can be as simple as incrementing a number or adding a ledger entry. Creating paper currency can be quite expensive. There are tens of billions of US notes in circulation.
Both are "profitable", as there is more money in the end, but governments are eating real costs to manage the physical bills.
Sweden has had a similar system for several years before PIX in Brazil. It is also integrated with the digital ID system (BankID). The main difference is that the Swedish system is ran through a private organization managed by all the major banks (and the central bank) in conjunction. So the central bank doesn't have direct access to the transaction data technically.
While the Brazilian system is only interacted directly through your bank application, the Swedish application is a separate application tied to your bank account in the backend. Given the... quality of bank apps this is a huge plus. The Swedish Swish app is MUCH easier to use because it only does one thing. My Brazilian mother does not know how to send PIX because her bank app is very confusing and the PIX option is just one of many.
The BankID system of Sweden though is even more impressive than money transactions, pretty much everything government related (including healthcare, taxes, etc) and most private institutions (bank apps, Swish, digital contract signatures) is done through the unified BankID login.
People raised concerns over privacy, but the main problem really is that since these systems cut out the middle man (Visa/Mastercard) and have no fees you also have no fraud protection which is something to keep in mind when using them. Once you send the money it is gone, the banks will not give it back to you even if you got scammed. It creates a whole sort of scam industry in both countries.
Both Swish and BankID have fees. After all, they're run by for-profit corporations.
Those apps also reduce competition in the banking sector since they're controlled by a few banks which generally have very high fees on their other services.
What's even worse, since BankID is private, there's no individual right to get it, and I've personally experienced banks abusing their oligopoly (buy this extra service or you won't get BankID from us).
The Swedish situation is a nightmare which nobody should try to emulate. Fortunately, the Swedish government has finally announced plans to introduce a public government eID, although 20 years too late.
I have never heard a single person complaining about BankID really. The only downside is the huge risks, especially for older people. We basically took control of an elderly family members bankid to avoid them being scammed.
This is something they really need to work on, just add an optional extra layer or cool-down, to slow everything down. You dont necessarily HAVE to have your transactions be immediate, waiting a few days would have been fine in our cases.
> What's even worse, since BankID is private, there's no individual right to get it
Nothing stops people from making it a right.
Brazilians have that right. Everyone can get a free checking account with transfers and Pix at every bank. They still try to sell us "service packages" but the idea of paying a fractional reserve bank any amount of money is just stupid if not abusive. They should be paying us for the privilege of having our money deposited into their reserves, not the other way around.
> the main problem really is [...] no fraud protection
It's a problem for the victims, but I don't think it's why there's a scam epidemic in Sweden - scammers don't care if you get reimbursed or not. I believe the root issue is the ease and speed of transactions - it's easy to get fooled in a moment of confusion, and before you realize what happened, the money is out of reach of the authorities - as cash, crypto or in foreign accounts.
I work in Swiss banking. We also have such a system for payments. Its very popular and used by most people. I keep saying they should use it as SSO, if you can authenticate payments you damn well can authenticate login requests. It makes no sense to go to an online shop, log-in with your shop account or google, and then when you pay, authenticate the payment with TWINT. And banks could even use it to login to their e-banking. Currently literally every bank has its own 'Access' App, that is almost the same but slightly different. And to my irritatingly they don't consistently encode TWINT information the same way into the normal banking transactions.
Our developer phones have like 40 apps on them to log into different test system, its madding.
In our system the pay system is also 'half' branded so you have to download 'TWINT-<bank>' not just 'TWINT'. Making it unnecessarily confusing and its literally the same app (from a user perspective).
It seems this Bank Id is an even earlier system adopted for modern SSO use-case.
Yes BankID is the real MVP of digital systems, I heard some talks about the EU making one valid for the whole block. Hopefully it will fix all the countries.Everything is done through BankID in swedish-only institutions.
Put house on sale? bankid. Book a doctor appointment? bankid. Login to bank? Bankid. Open bank account? bankid. Sign contracts? bankid.
Heck I moved my pension (like a lot of money) to a different institution by just using BankID. Didn't have to call/email anyone, the process took 5 minutes (with about a month to actually process the transaction).
I live in Switzerland - TWINT has other differences as well. To start, its settlement is not immediate as Pix's. As you point out, it is also not standardised.
Revolut is simplifying this, also in Switzerland. You checkout with the "Pay with Revolut" option. It's instant, magic and safe. You don't need to copy card details, just authorise the push notification.
I have also used it on airline websites, Aer Lingus and Wizz Air.
My suggestion would be to create an account for her with Nubank or Mercadopago, which are easier to use, faster to login than any banking apps, and have PIX more readily available after login, and then keep some money on the new account just for the kind of purchases she'd use pix for.
I do that for myself just for ease of use.
Literally everyone uses Swish in my experience. Even idiotic criminals.
We "had" to get swish (and a debit card..) for our 12 yo daughter because cash is just not very usable here. Although the CC is still used more than swish, but for transfers between persons, or smaller companies swish is very common.
This is the difference in Brazil. Because it's ran by the Central Bank, there are some fraud protections. For example, if you receive money by mistake, you have the option to return a transfer to the original sender. And if you don't do that almost immediately, the sender can actually sue you and get the bank to revert the transaction (once proven you've deliberately chosen to not return the money).
There are also other security features tailored for the crime aspect of Brazil (since some people argue Pix increased the number of flash robberies); you can limit how much money you can transfer via Pix during day and night time, and even request a second confirmation before the transfer actually goes through. And if you prove you've been robbed, the bank can easily revert the transaction and you can get your money back.
As a foreigner that visited Brazil for some weeks, I found the ubiquity of the PIX payment system to be a handicap for tourists visiting the country.
PIX is only for locals as you need to register with a CPF (Brazil ID number which is hard and tedious to get as a tourist). I ran into many scenarios where the only option was to pay with PIX and the staff aren't used to tourists and look at you funny when you explain you can't use PIX.
Also beyond PIX, if you try to book buses, planes, or take out a gym membership, while you're within the country, 99% of the time it's shockingly impossible to pay without a CPF, even by credit and debit card. I've even seen this for paying the laundry machine.
I'm sure the PIX system is great for Brazilians, and it was helpful having a local friend to make payments on my behalf, but Brazil really lives in a bubble where it seems a side-effect of their system is making things actively very hard for visitors to operate within the country.
> many scenarios where the only option was to pay with PIX
I guess you want to say "only option _beyond cash_ was Pix". Most places should accept Passport ID to replace CPF. But if you found hard to pay using credit cards, that has nothing to do with Pix...
It's now quite trivial to connect a foreign credit/debit card to Wepay, and it worked flawlessly on a recent trip. (This was very much not the case only a few years ago.)
You mean online right? Credit/debit card payment gateways are a little cumbersome for foreigners not only because they are a small amount of customers, but also because it opens a window for card fraud, which in Brazil, the online stores have to paid for it (as it is a non-physical credit card use).
Apparently Wise had a PIX functionality here in Brazil, but it seems that they removed it for some reason.
Readit News
Pix revolutionised the way we transact in Brazil. I've used Pix to pay for things that cost only cents, and I have a friend who bought her house using Pix. The system just works for any transfer amount. And it's so easy to use.
Its speed is truly baffling, and so is its reliability. Never have I failed to make a Pix payment because of downtime. I never cease to be amazed by how fast money arrives in my Brazilian account when I make a withdrawal directly from my EUR wallet on Wise. I receive a push notification from my Brazilian bank before Wise finishes running the animation of confirmation of withdrawal. It's like magic.
And it's so widespread that nowadays I don't even question whether someone accepts Pix. When I get in a taxi, no matter how old the driver is, it's certain that they take (and prefer) Pix.
I've even had homeless people ask me for Pix instead of change on multiple occasions.
Cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance.
After I had to add a special animation for one email system so that user was sure that "the core functionality of encrypting" was indeed working (it took milliseconds in reality), your experience doesn't surprise me that much. But, in my "IoT" system we have a mix of devices. Our service can handle most requests in sub millisecond, but some devices (gprs) need at least minimum 1 second (20sec is still within time limit) to respond only because of slow connectivity. And then I have a parking ticket machines where you press button, wait 2 seconds, it beeps, then after 2sec it changes screen to "printing ticket", then after 2s you get the ticket, where everything can be a local action (free ticket without payment). Technology is wild.
In my country, we have a similar system, and before my bank sends me a push notification about the outgoing transfer, the push notification for incoming transfer pops up for most of the time. The delay between push notifications rarely goes above 2 seconds.
Ours has an upper limit to prevent abuse of the system, but you can't beat instant, actually.
Maybe it needs up to 5 seconds to warm up if it's in deep sleep, so splitting this into three 2s periods provides the least frustrating user experience.
As soon as you need to deal with real hardware things always start to get complicated.
Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil - it's not even used in other Mercosur countries, what's the chance of having that adopted in other countries... And, that's problem #1.
How much do you trust your government with your money? A system like Pix don't stand a chance to get a worldwide adoption - maybe people are naive but governments won't unify to adopt a common system controlled by just a single entity / country.
What we may however end up with, are dozens of systems like Pix, one for each country, union, etc. Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant (see point 1)
Cryptocurrencies will likely never go away, and will remain in use for certain use cases from a cross border value transfer perspective, similar to gold; either the token moves or the ownership is updated. More interesting is offering digital wallets for a single or basket of currencies to anyone you can remotely identity proof in the world (similar to nsave [3]).
[1] https://www.volt.io/real-time-payments-world-map/
[2] https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/fmis/nexus.htm
[3] https://www.nsave.com/ | https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/nsave
> How much do you trust your government with your money?
Do you trust crypto companies? Mt. Gox, FTX, Bybit…
Do you know that crypto companies must follow government rules, regulations, and laws? Russians were banned from using many crypto exchange platforms. China has strict rules for its citizens. You can buy and sell crypto in Brazil, but you must use only Brazilian reals.
Pix isn't global, but no one government person outside of Brazil can block this system.
MasterCard, Visa, Amex, and UnionPay work worldwide, but only a few countries regulate them, can block their usage, and can use data for tracking and statistics.
Pix is free to use, so no one needs to pay an additional "tax" to MasterCard and Visa (it's about 3%).
Google and Apple cannot say that if you want to pay, you must use only our devices.
> Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil
Now, try to buy ice cream from street vendors using any crypto coins.
To you second point, I think the pix penetration/popularity proves that the majority of the people trust the government for that. There are 2 key reasons for its success: It was mandatory for Banks to adhere to the system and there are no fees for using it.
Once multiple countries have their own PIX, they just need to build a federation structure to connect them and allow cross-border transactions.
Crypto-currencies have their place with people who don't trust the government, want to speculate and/or simply want to do tax evasion, but they are not and probably never will be mainstream as a transaction medium.
When you use Pix, your money is not in custody of the government. The money goes to/comes from a standard commercial bank, just like a wire transfer. What the government (Central Bank) does is just the infrastructure for moving money between bank accounts.
The point about not being a global standard is valid, though. Although there are initiatives in progress to connect similar instant payment systems from different countries as other users have noted.
Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error.
Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant
And somehow less relevant than cash.
I can take cash from any country in the world to my local bank, and deposit it into my account. I can get a dozen different foreign currencies at my local branch in minutes, and almost any other currency in the world can be delivered to me by FedEx the next morning for a flat $10 fee.
I can take cash to any other country in the world and get it converted into the local currency, whether that's paper or digital in almost any city.
Crypto is great if you do a very few, very specific things in a vanishingly small number of places. But if I'd tied my finances to crypto instead of cash, I'd have been stuck many times in foreign lands.
Money is (for the purposes of this conversation) created and guaranteed by the government, and regulated by law, so I think it’s a little weird to not trust the government with my money.
You can pay with Pix in Paraguay since the largest privately owned payment processor implemented it and it's available within all payment terminals (POS) across the country.
The government of Paraguay also runs a similarly good system called SIPAP, that is replacing card payments because it's faster and free to use.
If you’re not able to trust the government to not steal your money then I suspect you have bigger problems and should look to claim asylum elsewhere.
Lol It's not that we may ended up like that, systems like Pix are built for the sole purpose of domestic transaction.
Globally, Visa / Mastercard trumps crypto.
Eh, the money was printed by government and any value it has is based on how much people trust their government. Using government payment processor is small potato compared to those...
The money that they issue? Your question is radically flawed.
That aside your main point is that crypto continues to be as relevant in cross jurisdiction payments even after the introduction of a pix like system of payments in each country.
Crypto transaction volumes across all crypto currencies are so low compared to FOREX in any of the worlds currencies (even relatively unused ones - currency speculators still drive transactions even there) that it’s basically irrelevant today in this use case. So your argument becomes it’s irrelevant today and will continue to be tomorrow.
If you’re to express the volume of all crypto transactions, not just those for the purpose of international transaction, just everything in all crypto currencies. The daily volume compared to transactions in all the other non crypto currencies ends up looking like a homeopathic dilution ratio, 0.00000000000000…%
>How much do you trust your government with your money?
Well I'm in Canada, I would trust the govt and the banks with my money before I trust anyone else (yes yes, trucker protest bullshit still didn't shake my confidence)
Which is ultimately the problem. The govt and well regulated banks are the only ones you should be able to trust, but in many case you can't trust governments or their ability to regulate things.
Crypto is only worth something because you can convert it to fiat and with that fiat can sign fiat denominated contracts that are enforced by the government.
Most people in Brazil won't do this so who gives a shit? You may as well say, "now try to use Pix on the moon!"
Fine keep using crypto as a store of “value” but as a way to handle day to day transactions it has failed.
Bitcoin can never be a Pix replacement. It's too damn slow, and others have pointed out, having to manage the entire transaction history is just stupid. (A end customer might not have to do serious book keeping on transaction history, but companies would.)
Pix works great for Brazil. That's what it was intended to do. And that's what it does. Case-closed.
Like if you want to bet on "Elon out of Trump administration before July?" you kind of have to go to polymarket or similar. (current price 41c)
Deleted Comment
I cannot fathom the reasoning that would lead you to believe this question is a big gotcha.
The value of any currency comes from the trust in the economy and military of the governments that stand behind it. The USD's value is backed by the economy and military of the United States. The Euro's value is backed by the economy and military of the Eurozone countries. If you live in the US and the economy collapses to the point the USD loses its value, the value of the USD will be your least concern - same if the US were invaded by a hostile military force and unable to defend itself.
Your currency is literally backed by your country. Your country issues the currency and your country sets the rules for how much additional currency banks can conjure into existence. Whether you use that currency in cash, bank transactions or payment systems doesn't affect that point. Cash is the only one of the three that's meaningfully different in that it allows the physical transfer of money without a "paper trail" because you can exchange it for goods and services directly (which doesn't apply to e.g. handing over keys to crypto wallets as part of a transaction because you can't move the balance off the wallet without leaving a digital trail).
There is no inherent value in cryptocurrencies just as there is no inherent value in state-backed currencies. The value of cryptocurrencies primarily hinges on their use as a speculative investment - even stocks or futures have a more concrete value basis (representing ownership of parts of a company and future ownership of trade goods respectively). This means its value is not tied to the performance or power of any one state but it also makes the value much more volatile and unreliable and much easier to manipulate.
Cryptocurrencies also stil rely on trust: for most cryptocurrencies you have to trust the people who issued it (and in some cases the underlying code), given how many have suffered from "rug pulls" and pump-and-dump schemes before. For currencies like BTC you also have to trust that no single actor can be able to perform a 51% attack. For currencies like ETH, you have to trust the smart contracts that might be involved (and have been exploited/abused before). Most people also rely on third party services to actually trade crypto currencies, so they need to trust those as well and there have been plenty of scams involving them even where they didn't turn out to be unreliable outright.
All currency is vulnerable to manipulation by agents with control over disproportionate amounts of it - billionaires, megacorps, banks, states using it as a reserve currency, etc. But non-cypto currencies suppress some of that control with their own and they have a symbiotic relationship with their currencies (i.e. if the USD does badly, that affects the US economy, which affects the US government budget, which affects its ability to maintain its institutitions including the military).
So the question then is not how much do you trust your government but do you trust your government more than the wealthiest other actors (domestic and foreign) that would exercise influence over the currency in its absence. Given that the state is not only the only thing enforcing the idea of property rights but also able to take everything away (including your physical freedom and life) from anyone who lives in its sphere of direct influence, even if you distrust your government more it's a moot point unless you also have the ability to flee it at a moment's notice if necessary - and I'd wager that's not the case for the overwhelming majority of people.
You say we may end up with systems like Pix for each country/union - sure but there's no reason there can't be interoperability between them the way there is with SWIFT transactions. At the moment Brazil seems to offer Pix International and Pix Roaming to open the system up to tourists and Brazilians travelling abroad but there's no reason similar systems can't develop a standard for direct compatibility without having to require support by each foreign bank or POS system.
Dead Comment
Does it work internationally? Does it send USD as well, or only the real?
If it solves th same problems, why is Brazil considering banning self-custodial USD stablecoins? And why has there been an ongoing discussion about launching mBRL, and stablecoin pegged to the real?
https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2024/brazil-considers-...
Everything from m-pesa in Kenya to Gcash in the Philippines to PromptPay in Thailand to Alipay in China to SGQR in Singapore to MPay in Oman....
The pattern is that these systems are nearly all fully centralised, require ID, zero privacy, usually government sanctioned, and not cross border.
Does crypto? You may have heard of this thing called "tariffs" lately. Even purchases of software licenses are tariffed in Brazil[1]. The average person purchasing goods with crypto is just going to ignore this and several similar laws.
If you say crypto works to transact internationally, keep in mind: so does TF2 hats.
1: https://www.machadoassociados.com.br/en/2021/05/brazilian-fe...
There are neighboring wallets (like Belo in Argentina) that support it, and I believe tourism will drive even more integration over time.
Sounds like WeChat Pay. It's been years now that beggars in China only carry QR codes.
> Cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance.
They solve a different problem or have the potential to: predictable/unbiased money issuance and on/off ramp for payment platforms.
Sounds like WeChat Pay. It's been years now that beggars in China only carry QR codes.
I saw a guy at a freeway offramp in north Texas with a Venmo (?) address scrawled on a piece of cardboard.
Relatedly, most company payments here, including water/electricity/etc bills, are paid using a system called Bankgiro, which is also a private company (and you can pay Bankgiro bills using Swish, of course).
And even the de facto national electronic identity system, BankID, is developed and provided by a private company. It is used to login to your bank as well as most government systems and any company can use it for login (which most Swedish companies do).
So, it differs from the Brazilian model in that all services are provided by private companies, not by the Government. Not sure which is better, to be honest. On the one hand it's hard to trust a Government like the Brazilian one given its history... on the other hand, trusting a private company even for public services seems wild: what if they go bankrupt, get sold to foreign investors, started using shady business practices??
Watching the Indian and Brazillian governements solve this problem by by building the payment networks themselves and removing the profit incentive has felt vindicating.
You're far too optimistic. The current administration is trying to work itself out of a major economic crisis and there's nothing they would like more than to tax the crap out of every single Pix transaction.
- no card
- technically not a specific app, its a payment method that any app with a checkout flow (for example) can chose to implement.
- you register some id with your financial institution of choice (any of CPF - equivalent to SSN, CNPJ - for businesses, phone number, email or a randomly generated key).
- keys are fully portable, as in you can revoke em or change the bank institution they're associated with any time.
- you can generate a QR code on the spot so the person paying can just scan it
- transfer is pretty much instant (under 5s seems to be the norm)
- no NFC (so works with any crappy phone)
- since its a bank transfer, and since bank transfers are insured up to 200k (afaik), its pretty safe.
Pix has several rules that makes up for a nice UX, such as being free for personal use and a 10-second limit to get a response after a transaction.
Pix is an open source specification, btw: https://github.com/bacen/pix-api
- SPI: responsible for the payments
- DICT: responsible for mapping keys to accounts
The API documentation of those services are available, but only banks can use them. When a person wants to send money to another, there's an option in the bank app for sending through Pix.
Then you have many options to define to whom you'll send that money:
- typing the bank account information
- using the Pix key (which can be an phone, email, CPF/CNPJ (brazillian documents) or a generated key)
- scanning a QR code
Note that the two latter options don't require the account information. That resolution is done by DICT.
After that, you type how much you'll send (sometimes the QR code already contains this information). Then it'll send through SPI.
And yeah, it's really, really fast.
Isn't paying with some phone apps the default in China? And I think transferring using phone apps has some success in Africa, too.
Technically a pre-paid option should be possible, but I could not find anything about something in that vein.
https://blog.remitly.com/money-transfer/complete-guide-brazi...
Until this line I forgot crypto was even competing!
and the transaction size limits is also too low, for me (I think you can send multiple in quick succession though)
to avoid random fintech platform and bank scrutiny for normal transactions and the higher scrutiny given to international transfers, I've used crypto for over a decade. For investment, to pay or be paid by vendors in other countries. Places where paypal/wise/revolute/n26 will flag, hold, or western union was the only option. This hasn't changed in that decade, only more onramps and offramps for crypto has changed for more proliferation.
once our crypto is within our respective domestic jurisdictions, cashing out typically has an extremely fast, non-scrutinized option, similar in speed to Pix
another comment mentioned that the Bank of International Settlements is working on instant cross border transactions, I suspect the scrutiny and transaction size limits will remain inferior to the unlimited size that crypto provides, and lack of scrutiny that a transaction converted to a domestic transaction will provide.
Been using stablecoins for a decade and the transaction costs have dropped as blockspace has become more abundant, and the stablecoin issuers create and redeem for free.
there is also the benefit of not needing the domestic currency or banking rails, since the crypto ecosystem has many investment options for different risk profiles, and many vendors to pay for goods and services.
It is very common that people do not find this competitive because they aren't aware they have a problem, or don't have a problem. But many people do encounter a friction once they branch out into another industry to try to change their circumstances, or earn larger amounts. That attracts enough people to crypto.
I do not see how this is better than cryptocurrency, which, while not fully anonymous aside from Monero, is at least decentralized.
Technologists repeatedly get this wrong. The best money system is the one that lets me buy groceries in exchange for working, not the one that's cryptographically unbreakable. Unless I'm running an illegal internet-based drug empire, in which case, the ones that aren't cryptographically unbreakable are disqualified, since I'd need the government to not be able to trace the money flow in my illegal drug empire. But even real illegal drug empires that are not internet-based mostly use government-issued currency, with measures taken to hinder tracing!
What if they deny service to or apprehend the assets of people they politically dislike? Also couldn't they crush any hope of anyone's profitable business? Could a person or business function without it? What about in ten years?
What if they track people by their transaction and built profiles of them? They could essentially make it too dangerous to do business to people who are disliked.
As far as I can tell the legal landscape of the solution currently only allow the actual government to look at the data with the standard court orders. I believe not even the 10k report limit is applied to pix atm the same way as the other methods.
Regarding fake transactions, that would be a non concern to me, the system is only centralised in parts, the banks still hold most of the data so they would have to collaborate on this potentially leaving lots of evidence behind. Governments do not need to be subtle to screw you over, see current US deportation news.
Its not that much different than how bank transfers in Europe work in practice. The US is particularly archaic in banking technology available to the public.
As a citizen of a still kind-of-functioning democracy, I'd happily make the trade if that means Apple, Google, Visa or Mastercard don't have the information anymore.
There must be a non-repudiation and integrity check to verify transactions (e.g., in Estonia I sign digitally all my transactions), so the latter problem is easier to mitigate.
It's not different from what we had before.
EDIT: it didn't actually change a thing. Banks are still required to maintain transaction data private, and agencies, including the government, MUST obtain a warrant to break transaction data secrecy.
And if a government decides to just ignore those, it will also have no need to watch your transactions or create fake ones.
The recipient's name and part of their ID are displayed on the confirmation page. This allows you to verify their identity, as the name must be linked to a real ID.
Users must set transaction and daily limits, with any changes taking effect only after 24–48 hours.People are encouraged to maintain lower limits.
Since transactions are tied to real individuals, it becomes easier for law enforcement to track down the recipient after a scam is identified.
btw, Pix is not an app, it is a service/infrastructure that can be used by any bank
> Cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance.
Yeah, if you enjoy having your money one hundred percent controlled by the brazilian government. I can't think of a more frightening proposition. You do realize this is the country that once suddenly confiscated everybody's money directly from their bank accounts, right?
Why did they do that? Runaway inflation. Just like its fellow latin american neighbors, Brazil has mismanaged all of its currencies and it will inflate the real to zero just like all the others, it's merely a matter of time. Just look at the country's economic situation. BRL is an absolute garbage currency. Why would you even want to hold onto this crap? You're better off holding USD if you can. You're better off holding real property if you've got the capital. You're better off holding bitcoins.
Cryptocurrency? They're basically the light at the end of the tunnel. You say you've lived here 20 years. Surely you know that judges are basically gods in this country. And we have judges admitting in writing that it's essentially impossible for them to seize or in any way touch your bitcoins without your secret keys. Do you seriously believe they have no chance? In this place? They're basically the solution to nearly every single problem in the "government is stupid" category.
Surely you know that the brazilian government sucks at pretty much everything except taxing you. And you're advocating for a system that essentially implements nation wide financial surveillance. Because our number one priority is to make taxation of an already heavily taxed people even more efficient, right? So that the politicians and judge kings can enjoy their world tours on tax payer money?
Pix is very convenient. That's all it is, and unfortunately that's all it needs to be to win the hearts of people. People won't be smiling after the government starts blocking their Pix keys for arbitrary reasons, preventing them from participating in society.
The only hope for any system is if the people fight to not live within these kinds of fascist states. Crypto is not some magic solution - and has a lot of downsides which are mentioned often.
The bad thing is that Pix shows it will work for many, many years.
They protect against tracking and provide anonimity. That might be valuable.
Deleted Comment
I wonder about a few things.
Is it safe? I'm pretty sure everyone not carrying cash is very good for physical safety, but can someone be coerced into emptying their bank account at knifepoint?
Are there scams? Can stolen money be retrieved?
Given the dimension of Pix, I never heard of someone losing money directly because of using it (for example, here in the past was common to see where credit cards were cloned)
> can someone be coerced into emptying their bank account at knifepoint?
There are limits of use. Banks have different settings for limiting the amount of money that will be transferred in different situations, like when using their apps outside a trusted network, at night, etc
> Are there scams?
Just like any other payment method. I dare say that it is even safer, as some banks (e.g. Nubank) alerts if you are trying to transfer money to a suspect account.
> Can stolen money be retrieved?
Perhaps if you contact the bank, but as far as I know it is not a feature :-(
Pix can't facilitate cross-border micro payments.
But payment processors in Brazil are already offering “international pix”, that Brazilians can use to pay foreign companies. It’s the same experience as pix for the customer but behind the scenes the company deals with the cross border payment.
There are even stores accepting pix in Portugal: https://www.publico.pt/2025/01/23/publico-brasil/noticia/pix...
No reason it couldn't. Bizum (mobile payments in Spain) started with just Spain but can now be used for payments across & to/from Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Andorra.
Bizum is also a member of European Mobile Payment Systems Association which I think will eventually lead to all members being able to make transfers to other members, but that might a somewhat dream rather than actual reality today.
You bet. Every pix transaction is reported to the brazilian authorities.
Deleted Comment
...except for inflation.
Deleted Comment
Lucky you. I've been living here since i was born. :(
Pix is surreal. It was launched in the Bolsonaro (mal)administration, designed by the proverbially incompetent public work force, and is as Orwellian as can be. Its code is nowhere to be found.
The funniest thing is that is has been adopted feverishly by the rabid right wing crazies, the same lot who want to destroy everything 'government'.
I take pleasure in listing three of the problems:
1. Lack of Transparency
2. Potential for Abuse
A government-controlled payment system centrally-controlled, with no auditability? Oh please give me more (/s)
3. Censorship and Political Control
https://exame.com/economia/questionado-por-apoiador-bolsonar...
- PIX project started in 2016, public launch in 2020
- It was not "launched" by any President; the Brazilian Central Bank is an independent authority, with it own mandate, not a branch of the executive power
- PIX was co-developed with institutions of the financial sector
- It's a protocol that participants must implement, not an app. The specification is even on GitHub. I don't know what you mean by "its code is nowhere to be found".
- The Brazilian Central Bank is acknowledged as a benchmark, rather than "proverbially incompetent public work force"
If you have moved about 15 years before that, you'd have experienced the hyperinflation years and you've come to understand why Brazilian (retail) banking systems were always pushing the state of the art.
(You'd also understand that cryptocurrencies are not meant to compete with payment networks that have institutional backing, but that's a lesson for another day)
Due to it's commercial origin, Alipay is filled with unwanted ads and traps. Almost every time I made a payment with it, a pop up prompts me to enlist their Ant Financial LOAN service either now, or being prompted for the same question again 30 days later (yep, not Yes or No, but Now or Later). It's just fucking ridiculous, I don't need a LOAN for a $400 projector, and I don't need a LOAN for a $4 hair cut (Xi should probably do something about it, really).
I'm glad that at least people of Brazil don't have to suffer that kind of shit. At least their government-run program is better scrutinized and boring, thus more dependable, that's a good thing in my eyes.
After dealing with many private sector services, I think a lot of things should be government run.
For instance: weather apps. Private sector ones are just a vector to track and sell your location data, and they rely on government data anyway. It'd be much better the government roll out an API and an app that uses it, so you can avoid the private sector altogether.
It's also used to give alerts to electricity companies, etc...
Their weather prediction, it's just way better than any other service.
There's also national service, run by CPTEC/INMET, but they are lacking funding IMO...
[1] https://simepar.br
The commercial parties sued KNMI, even though they use the public data provided by KNMI. Luckily they lost: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/02/knmi-weathers-legal-app-sto...
And as a bonus, there was some Streisand Effect when this was in the news, and people have been moving to the KNMI app in droves.
Or you do it like we do here in Germany and take the dumbest route you can imagine.
We had a very well working publicly funded weather app from DWD (Deutscher Wetter Dienst). The primarily purpose of this app was to warn from extreme weather conditions, but it also included an ad free (because publicly funded) and rather accurate forecast.
Then a private entity sued claiming that the DWD app also providing weather information is unfair competition for private competitors. The won in court and now the publicly funded DWD app has a paywall for a previously free feature.
Your iPhone skins the government data and makes it pretty. Nobody is selling your location or information. And you can always get the data directly if you want.
You really like government, you just can’t figure out what it ought to be or how to keep it.
i’ve worked on internet projects with the feds before, basically the current iteration of the federal government does not really seem capable of doing these things because of how the rank-and-file is structured.
i think it would also be important to make sure that control over payment isn’t abused. i recall when donations to wikileaks were effectively blocked by public/private coordination. presumably that would be even easier if it just required public action.
Our federal government is huge and our state governments are small. Precisely the opposite of how the founders configured it. This is part of the problem.
The states need to band together and develop a cooperative solution and then push it upwards to the federal level.
This is a lot easier than centralized planning and management of an entity the size and scope of the US. We have a lot of offshore territories and two states. This complicates things more than people care to admit.
At least most aren't as intrusive as Alipay, but they do exist.
Yes I think so. These flashy gamified things are considered kitsch. Designers here prefer lots of white space.
I can't say I have a good alternative. The co-op model works for supermarkets on an international scale, and for banks on a national scale (I am unaware of any international co-op banks). I wonder if it could work for payments.
I'd prefer a constitutional mandate or guarantee that this can't happen. Without it this is a noose. A convenient noose with lots of nice properties but a noose none the less.
How much worse is that than the same thing happening when you do something a private company doesn't like?
And how much different is that than what the Federal government could already do? If the government says you're a terrorist, you're not accessing any banking.
I think a largely prefer a government-run payment system than an US company monopoly.
There are so many powerful and influential anti/small-government that are rabidly opposing anything made by the government, and offered to the people.
The argument is always the same:
- "It will stifle innovation"
- "It is unfair to business"
- "It will make people dependent on the government"
- "It will give government more access to spy on the citizens"
and the list goes on.
For decades the American people have been told that anything the government touches will be expensive, inefficient, and lead to a more taxes. Private sector knows best, and all that.
And it is especially bad right now. You had MAGA-influencers outright rejoicing that DOGE had laid off the 18F team, spreading the gospel that free (government-run) tax tools are an abomination.
realistically, the workforce that was hired around sorting through hundreds of thousands of bureaucratic paper documents in the 70s/80s is not the same workforce that can really build new products and the feds are mostly the former.
Do you have some counter arguments?
That is the monopoly cost. UPI is free for both payee and payer. Whatever it costs banks to operate it is covered by reduced cost of dealing with cash/consumer.
UPI is owned by NPCI(gov entity) and runs on top of IMPS both the networks are strongly regulated by RBI the central bank.
There is fair amount of regulation and KYC/ AML requirements before an app/service gets direct access to the network and even then it can be pretty challenging. WhatsApp struggled for years to get UPI integration .
Holding money in a wallet has even more regulations than merely transferring it .
Payment networks tend to centralize by their nature. I see pix or UPI as competitor to Mastercard or VISA , they have proven it is possible to run a network far cheaper than claimed
Even a small country like Denmark has multiple software and finance companies doing apps and software in the digital payments and banking field.
You should try to take a train in Switzerland sometime. Its government run and I guarantee you will be mind blown over its efficiency.
Cases in point:
- To transfer money to a broker, I need to pay around $5 in transfer fees via ACH or wire
- I want to change the custody of my stock market assets from one broker to another, and it will cost me $75 to move $60 worth of shares. Meanwhile, in Brazil, this process is free in every broker.
You can’t say the same about the US and its actual oligarchs.
(The corrupt part is true)
A centralized – often socialist – government is the _definition_ of monopoly, you can't escape from it without risking jail or worse. No U.S. monopoly, no matter how much you hate it, will get close to this, and you think it does, you are sincerely naive at least.
It's technically quite impressive - it's a large scale thing and it works really well. I can think of maybe one or two times in these years where I saw downtime, and in both cases it was working again after a few minutes. The usual experience with the government building technical solutions is to have something that makes little sense, is slow, and goes down frequently with even the most predictable usage peaks, but with Pix they really seem to have nailed it.
It does feel a bit weird to have so many payments go through the government's systems, and it definitely feels like it puts them in a position of having more information than they should. There's a lot of Orwellian surveillance potential there, as any transfers are necessarily tied to both users' real identities. I don't think there's a realistic way around this, though.
Another concern is that people can expose some of their information without necessarily being aware of it. You can register e.g. emails and phone numbers as Pix "keys", and then anyone can initiate a transfer to those keys and your full name will pop up so you can confirm or cancel the transfer. I've seen some clever advice around this - "When using a carpooling app (often details are arranged off the platform using WhatsApp), put the driver's phone number on Pix. If a name comes up and it doesn't match the name or gender of the driver's profile, something is up". Obviously though there's potential for misuse and I'm sure the vast majority of people don't think about this when registering their Pix keys. You can, however, just use randomly generated uuids as keys as well, a different one for each transaction if you so desire, so this one can be a non-issue with more awareness.
Overall though it's a very convenient thing which works surprisingly well, and the downsides are theoretical at this point. IMO it's a rare case of our government nailing something.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/brazil-suspends-w...
Tangentially related, I've heard talk of EU alternative to VISA and Mastercard, which I also believe is the right direction.
Although they can replace a lot (most?) of existing transactions that are currently done through credit cards, there is still a place for them.
There is Wero, I guess similar to Pix as an alternative for instant payment like PayPal, but it's meant to be used with your bank account and not a lot of banks support it.
But we must also be realistic if we want to win against our eternal enemy Eastasia, and admit that Facebook coin would never be a monopoly because Visa, Mastercard and cash exist.
You wouldn’t want a foreign company with billions of dollars in their war chest in charge of your countries payment system.
VISA, Mastercard, HSBC, UnionPay, ICBC, Santander... Or is this all Brazilian technology?
The difference is that Meta is privacy data hoarder, not that it's a foreign company. And it's not "in charge of countries payment system", because that's pretty-much impossible, but "one of the payment systems in the country".
securitization and anti-globalization makes us all poorer, worse off, and more prone to conflict. lawfare is an addictive drug and can lead to serious outcomes, as history in Brazil shows any number of times - like even with the current president.
The president of the Brazilian Central Bank is accountable. Zuckaberg isn't.
That's not a fact, in fact it's typically the other way round, issuing a currency is generally profitable and the profits typically flow into the general government budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage It's managed by the central bank, though, btw, which is considered separate from the government for governance reasons.
Of course, none of that stands in the way of creating public payments infrastructure.
Both are "profitable", as there is more money in the end, but governments are eating real costs to manage the physical bills.
While the Brazilian system is only interacted directly through your bank application, the Swedish application is a separate application tied to your bank account in the backend. Given the... quality of bank apps this is a huge plus. The Swedish Swish app is MUCH easier to use because it only does one thing. My Brazilian mother does not know how to send PIX because her bank app is very confusing and the PIX option is just one of many.
The BankID system of Sweden though is even more impressive than money transactions, pretty much everything government related (including healthcare, taxes, etc) and most private institutions (bank apps, Swish, digital contract signatures) is done through the unified BankID login.
People raised concerns over privacy, but the main problem really is that since these systems cut out the middle man (Visa/Mastercard) and have no fees you also have no fraud protection which is something to keep in mind when using them. Once you send the money it is gone, the banks will not give it back to you even if you got scammed. It creates a whole sort of scam industry in both countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID
Both Swish and BankID have fees. After all, they're run by for-profit corporations.
Those apps also reduce competition in the banking sector since they're controlled by a few banks which generally have very high fees on their other services.
What's even worse, since BankID is private, there's no individual right to get it, and I've personally experienced banks abusing their oligopoly (buy this extra service or you won't get BankID from us).
The Swedish situation is a nightmare which nobody should try to emulate. Fortunately, the Swedish government has finally announced plans to introduce a public government eID, although 20 years too late.
This is something they really need to work on, just add an optional extra layer or cool-down, to slow everything down. You dont necessarily HAVE to have your transactions be immediate, waiting a few days would have been fine in our cases.
Nothing stops people from making it a right.
Brazilians have that right. Everyone can get a free checking account with transfers and Pix at every bank. They still try to sell us "service packages" but the idea of paying a fractional reserve bank any amount of money is just stupid if not abusive. They should be paying us for the privilege of having our money deposited into their reserves, not the other way around.
It's a problem for the victims, but I don't think it's why there's a scam epidemic in Sweden - scammers don't care if you get reimbursed or not. I believe the root issue is the ease and speed of transactions - it's easy to get fooled in a moment of confusion, and before you realize what happened, the money is out of reach of the authorities - as cash, crypto or in foreign accounts.
Our developer phones have like 40 apps on them to log into different test system, its madding.
In our system the pay system is also 'half' branded so you have to download 'TWINT-<bank>' not just 'TWINT'. Making it unnecessarily confusing and its literally the same app (from a user perspective).
It seems this Bank Id is an even earlier system adopted for modern SSO use-case.
Put house on sale? bankid. Book a doctor appointment? bankid. Login to bank? Bankid. Open bank account? bankid. Sign contracts? bankid.
Heck I moved my pension (like a lot of money) to a different institution by just using BankID. Didn't have to call/email anyone, the process took 5 minutes (with about a month to actually process the transaction).
I have also used it on airline websites, Aer Lingus and Wizz Air.
We "had" to get swish (and a debit card..) for our 12 yo daughter because cash is just not very usable here. Although the CC is still used more than swish, but for transfers between persons, or smaller companies swish is very common.
There are also other security features tailored for the crime aspect of Brazil (since some people argue Pix increased the number of flash robberies); you can limit how much money you can transfer via Pix during day and night time, and even request a second confirmation before the transfer actually goes through. And if you prove you've been robbed, the bank can easily revert the transaction and you can get your money back.
Also these kind of limits can also be put on credit (and debit) cards.
PIX is only for locals as you need to register with a CPF (Brazil ID number which is hard and tedious to get as a tourist). I ran into many scenarios where the only option was to pay with PIX and the staff aren't used to tourists and look at you funny when you explain you can't use PIX.
Also beyond PIX, if you try to book buses, planes, or take out a gym membership, while you're within the country, 99% of the time it's shockingly impossible to pay without a CPF, even by credit and debit card. I've even seen this for paying the laundry machine.
I'm sure the PIX system is great for Brazilians, and it was helpful having a local friend to make payments on my behalf, but Brazil really lives in a bubble where it seems a side-effect of their system is making things actively very hard for visitors to operate within the country.
I guess you want to say "only option _beyond cash_ was Pix". Most places should accept Passport ID to replace CPF. But if you found hard to pay using credit cards, that has nothing to do with Pix...
Apparently Wise had a PIX functionality here in Brazil, but it seems that they removed it for some reason.