[Metalab] YaXwe hacker camp - "hacker autonomy vs money"

[Bernd Petrovitsch]

On Wed, 2007-09-05 at 10:45 +0200, Iang wrote:
> Bernd Petrovitsch wrote:
> 
> > Kurz: Sobald es ein alternatives System gibt, daß großflächig verbreitet
> > ist,
> > wird es mbMn auch Spekulanten etc. geben.
> 
> Size is a big factor, and an important one to to watch.  But 
> we can do better than that.  (Relying on a google/human 
> translation here so maybe I got the wrong meaning...)

Don't get me wrong - I'm not stating with my last mail that I
think it is good that way or should/must be that way and/or
shouldn't be changed and/or. It's simply my observation together
with some reasoning on the "why".

> We know much more about how to put in place trouble-limited 
> payment systems than we did in the digicash days.  There are 
> many examples around, you can check for example the fee 
> structure of Paypal versus the others, and wonder why Paypal 
> fees are so high.  Easy answer:  they like and appreciate a 
> floor of trouble, because that keeps fees high, and high 
> fees means high profits.  Fee structures of other systems 

Another easy answer: AFAIK they were the first that offered such
a service. So if you are the only supplier (the first one on the
market with a completely new product/service or you have a
monopoly or whatever is the reason), you usually can ask for more
because of the lack of alternatives.

> are 1-2 orders of magnitude lower, and sustainable, because 
> they use a lot of the techniques we have developed since the 
> halcyon days of simple cryptographic designs.

So what are the (working) alternatives to PayPal?

	Bernd
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