As much as I like SEPA it is primarily for bank transfers.

The way that payments work through SEPA is that the merchant pulls the money from your account. Legally they require a "mandate" - this can be as little as a handwritten signature on a document.

Security is essentially provided by easy reversal and strong penalties for abuse.

As opposed to blockchain where reversal depends on the grace of the merchant.

I've often wondered whether payments providers entering the blockchain space (like Visa/Mastercard) would act as trusted intermediaries for dispute resolution. Kind of a 2-of-3 multisig to disperse the funds in escrow.

One of the most common examples of smart contacts is a reversible transaction with dispute resolution by a third-party.

Infact you could implement exactly what you suggest in a similar way.

I'm sorry but I'm big into crypto and have never seen a contract like that deployed in the wild.

And I actually use crypto for payments more than most people. I used some just last week to buy a replica rolex from a chinese dealer because they gave a better price than credit cards.

You've never staked a token? Every single major chain and most exchanges have staking contracts deployed which are essentially the same thing (you can't access your tokens until an oracle says so, or you cancel out).

Is there also no fee for merchants? I thought business accounts are usually not as cheap as (or free like) consumer ones, some (all?) iirc pay per transaction or have tiers

It's also really hard to interface with. Afaik, I can't simply get an API token from my bank and send 2-cent transactions to pages I read if they'd publish the IBAN as part of an HTTP header or meta tag for example. Nor do I know that my bank would be happy about a thousand tiny transactions each month

SEPA (and all other sorts of payment processors) don't work for micro payments, because no one wants to forward a 5cent payment, or they will charge another 20cent as a fee. We had the WebPayments API fail over exactly this.

What do you mean?

I just tried transferring 0.01€ and it showed 0€ in transaction fees.

Not sure what you're on about.

Because you are a private entity. Buisness Accounts usually charge per transfer, even incoming (i.e. my german Postbank business account charges 0.10€ for every INCOMING transfer).

And if you start receiving hundreds of 0.01c transfers into your private bank account, you will receive a friendly phone call from you bank very soon.

Ah so what you are saying only applies to business accounts. Your originally post did not make that distinction.

USA has started a FedNow program to make, basically, ACH faster.

Will take ages for that to become a browser extension, or embed. Too many parties make money off the current way. Similar to the health "care" ("insurance") in USA

> Will take ages for that to become a browser extension, or embed.

"ACH faster" cannot and should not become a browser extension, ever.

You could instead argue that the Fed ought to additionally implement a blind signature service a la Digicash. Then customers could make anonymous digital cash payments to participating banks and businesses. (I.e., the recipient is known but the payer isn't.)

Would you advocate for that? If so, you'd have to battle way more cryptobros than Visa/Mastercard lobbyists. Hell, the cryptobros are already spamming Youtube saying ISO 20022 is an evil conspiracy by banking incumbents. And that's just an XML messaging spec!

Imagine the pushback here on HN if you seriously pushed for the fed to do proper digital cash.

In Brazil we already have a free, instantaneous payment system with a well documented API

https://github.com/bacen/pix-api