Sad to see a Brazilian company who offered so many jobs being forked out.
They have unbelievable talent in Brazil.
I've fought my manager to hire a good one from Brazil.
They have an unbelievable wealth of amazing education, add to that a strong reason to want to be successful.
I've worked and hired a lot of people over the years, of all of them; Brazilians were the best, they know what they're doing, in our office at the time that let everyone to relax and enjoy. If you don't know what you're doing. You're fired. End of. Used to love that office.
We got work done while having fun. Count the UN, more or less was there.
Everything was delivered quick and mostly always above that spec, because they 'understood' it better.
10 / 10
End of the day : They have an insane education system, it's good but maybe too aggressive. (look to the law exam).
They know how to study.
Lookup the law exam. It's rough.
Edit:
If you're poor in Brazil, options are limited. Coding is an EXIT point, that can lead to better.
> They have an insane education system, it's good but maybe too aggressive
Entire essays can and have been written about the problems of our education system. My favorite one was written by Feynman and it has already been cited in this thread. I'd like everyone here to know that it's stunningly accurate to this very day. I actually gave up programming as a career because the system and my peers demoralized me so much. Pursued an alternative career instead.
I'll have you know that brazilians who speak english fluently are the elite, likely private school educated. That's the pool of candidates you're selecting from. Those are the brazilians you're likely to meet here on this site.
> Lookup the law exam. It's rough.
Not at all. It's the bare minimum and it wasn't even enough to prevent the job market from being literally flooded with lawyers.
Had you cited concursos which roughly mean "contests for government jobs" you would have been right. Few job openings, tens of thousands of brazilians competing for them, infrequent tests. That's how judges are selected, for example. I know people who literally study for 10 hours every single day and who have yet to make it into one of these positions.
Compare Unicamp or USP curriculum to any major US university if you have to, they will be pretty interesting. The Ivy league universities are a ridiculous small pool of all universities in US. I like Feynman but there's idiocy in assuming his observations from more than forty years ago as the whole truth for all graduation courses in the country.
What US has in superior is the mentoring culture, the business people interwoven in the university culture (like the extra courses offered in Sloan with real companies!), the sharp focus on patent, other things. But technical knowledge in top Brazilian universities will compete or outclass technical knowledge in US. But there are many things important, supporting things, a whole infrastructure beyond the technical people required to advanced technology.
It's not idiocy. Everything he wrote about education in Brazil, I experienced first hand. Even if what you said is true, curriculum comparisons don't invalidate my experience.
The most demoralizing thing was the phoniness. The pointlessness of it all. Everybody was just going through the motions. The only thing people wanted to know was the exact sequence of steps they had to follow in order to achieve success. Everybody here knows you have to go to school in order to not be a nobody. So everyone goes to school. It barely matters what field they pick, anything will do. The more prestigious the better. People go to these places and they study crap they don't actually care about because it's all just a means to an end.
I was constantly surrounded by people who I felt didn't actually enjoy computers as much as I did. Made me so disillusioned I chose to do something else with my life. I just couldn't bear to be around people like that anymore.
Probably. I don't really know anything about american education so it's not wise for me to comment. I do have this perception that software is suffering from that problem worldwide though. People used to study this stuff because they liked computers, now everyone is learning to code because they want the comfortable rich programmer lifestyle. It just feels soulless to me.
My experience has been that the ceiling is highest in the US but that the floor is significantly higher in a number of other countries. And I say this as someone who chose to leave a Top 10 US uni to do undergrad in the UK and grad in UK/Japan, so I’m not particularly inclined towards the US model.
> I'll have you know that brazilians who speak english fluently are the elite
100% this. I've visited Brazil as a tourist and if I did not go with a Portuguese speaking friend, I would have been lost on day one. English is pretty much only spoken by people who can afford private education there.
>I'll have you know that brazilians who speak English fluently are the elite
Not exactly. Different realities exist among the many states and high school public education levels. Most English-speaking people in Brazil might come from affluent or high-middle-class households, but that doesn't necessarily determine their interest in pursuing a career in tech. More to the point, having an interest in tech can motivate learning English, as that makes you instantly able to tap into the wealth of free information and learning material out there. Most excellent professionals I know didn't even have a degree for their first 2 or 3 years of experience, let alone formal training in English, but they all could communicate adequately. I would also add that formal education "support" you way less than other fields. Experience is the critical component, imo.
I can illustrate this perfectly, albeit anecdotally: I come from a very disadvantaged background, a poor family, both parents didn't even finish high school, got public education all my life. My first PC was assembled from old parts that my father could salvage after he left his job as a bus driver to fix computers for a living. He got me a magazine one day with a CD that came with visual basic 6.0, he installed it, and I started messing around, knowing almost nothing of what I was doing. I just liked that when I dragged some things and put them in that grey window, it looked like the other programs I used to draw on (mspaint). I was 11-12 at the time, and from that moment on, I was hooked. I began understanding how to put behavior into things and what code was, mainly from the magazine pictures, then from other books my father started to get for me. Fast forward 5 years, I got my first internship 2 years before getting into an IF because I made a PHP website for someone, and they referred me to someone else.
10 years later, I had more experience than people who were almost twice my age, having worked for 4 different companies and building a clientele myself, because trust me, I needed that extra money. All along, I learned how to read and listen because of all the studying needed to do things in my job. Then I discovered forums, then Reddit, which made me start to write. That came in handy when I decided to apply for positions in foreign companies. 2 years ago, I started working for a company in Central Europe.
Now pair that trajectory with one from a friend of mine the same age as me, born into a wealthy family in Rio, both parents highly educated, always had access to quality equipment, internet, etc, graduated from a respected federal university, learned to speak 3 languages since he was a kid.
Because he spent so much time in uni, when he joined the company I was working for, he had no professional experience. Because of that, the way he progressed was slow, much to the incompetence of leadership, who saw people like that as always green, regardless of talent or skills acquired. He couldn't recognize that he was being held back; he had never worked for anyone else before, so he stayed and stayed and stayed, lured by derisory raises and false promises. He didn't have the drive to pursue clients outside the company, so he kept to his hobbies most of his free time. Anyway, long story short, all the other teammates left (interestingly enough, with stories similar to mine) for foreign companies.
Anyway, the moral of the story is: incentives are different depending on your background and the market tends to reward experience over formal education for relatively good paying coding positions.
Hate to be a party-pooper, but as a Brazilian I can assure you that is not the case.
The thing, is that Brazil has some unique factors at play that allow some people to insane levels of proficiency with tech.
One of them is that tech is relatively cheap here. Sure, if you want the latest you will have to pay an arm and a leg. However we have some local brands that make some pretty affordable hardware. Positivo is one brand that comes to mind.
They have a terrible reputation for selling crap (and the reputation is well deserved) but what they sell is good enough for to run a browser.
Another important factor is that internet access is pretty cheap around here. I pay US$ 25 for a fiber connection with 600mb up/300mb down. And there are plenty of other options that are cheaper than that.
And there is also the economic shitshow we are living in the last 15 years.
When you combine all this you get an environment where people have to always keep working hard. Because if you don't, someone else will. And all companies are pretty happy to ditch you in favor of someone that works harder. And even with the social securities we have it absolutely impossible to live with basic dignity without a job.
But I understand you sentiment. I've felt it when I was working for a company in Portugal. There most people simply didn't care. Especially when shit hits the fan. Some people would just logoff and go home: "tomorrow we'll deal with it". I was SHOCKED to see that, this is simply unacceptable in the tech sector here in Brazil.
About the law exam, it's not really that hard. You have 4 years to prepare for that. And if you look for data in the good universities you'll the approval rate is pretty high. The problem is that a lot of places are pretty bad, and are basically just pretending to teach something useful. This way they can get your money, waste your time and shift the blame to you when you don't succeed in the exam.
> [Brazil has] an insane education system, it's good but maybe too aggressive.
Richard Feynman had a not-so-positive view of the Brazillian education system, which he summarized with "no science is being taught in Brazil!"[0]. Granted, his view was based on personal experience around half a century ago, so everything may have changed since then (possibly even due to Feynman's influence).
> Lookup the law exam. It's rough.
I'm having a hard time finding comprehensive resources here. I've found bits and pieces that make it seem...not that scary. 80 multiple choice questions where 40 correct is a pass, and then a few essays. A 2022 article[1] states that some prestigious law programs have bar passing rates near 80% while the average pass rate is closer to 30%. American states have per-state bar exams, with average pass rates in 2023 ranging from 31% (Alabama) to Alaska (75%) [2]. Is the difficulty of the exam not easily represented in statistics?
I'm Brazilian, and I think I can add some context. I think OP's perspective is just survivor bias.
Our public (state-owned) education system (pre-college) is doing very bad, scoring poorly on PISA[0] year after year. On the other hand, the public tertiary education system is very advanced, but getting into it is tough and supporting the academic environment is also difficult (we have very high dropout rates in most STEM courses). Most upper middle-class families also expect that their children will study at a public university, so they're forced to study hard to pass in the admission exam.
Also, keep in mind that most Brazilians don't speak a second language and those who do, are generally from a more affluent background or from a poorer background but with a good academic track record that granted them a scholarship to a private institution in high school or earlier.
So, those brilliant engineers he mentioned are probably some of those people: smart people that got into the top-notch of our education system (by either being gifted or because they just got used to studying for long hours because their parents demanded it). However, the inequality within the country is abysmal. For every talented, smart Brazilian engineer, there are hundreds of functional illiterates - a 2012 study estimated that 38% of our college students are functional illiterates[1].
A classic tale of South American inequality.
PS: The government has admittance quotas in the public universities for students coming from poorer backgrounds (income, race or coming from public high schools). This helped shift the balance in those institutions, but since the admission is based on an exam[2], you can still expect those students to be above the average since there are always more students taking the test than there are available vacancies.
I’ll just add to OP’s point with my own example: I’m a Brazilian that grew up in a middle-class family and sort of “made it” working at multiple FAANG in my 20s.
OP is totally right that our education system is broken.
I was lucky enough that my dad worked at Petrobras (Brazilian oil company) and, at the time, they payed for half my high school fees. I also had a 50% scholarship and that made it possible for my parents to send me to a good private school.
Initially I got into a sort of public “trade school” in high school. I was taking high school classes in the morning and IT/programming classes in the afternoon. After a month of that I just quit and asked my parents to go back to the private school because I felt I wouldn’t be able to pass the university entrance exams if I stayed there. That’s how bad it was.
As to the Brazilians working hard, yeah I agree with that. After I went to the private high school I took the trade school entrance exam again, but this time to take the classes at night. My second and third years of high school were pretty much: Wake up at 5.30am, go to high school till 1pm, go to a “cram school” in the afternoon to practice for the university entrance exams, and then from 7pm to 11pm go to trade school.
Looking back I’m not sure how I managed that. I even developed some serious migraines due to the lack of sleep and stress. Thankfully it went away after I went to uni and my workload dropped.
I was just really lucky to be in a position where I could go all in.
Unfortunately the reality is that most people don’t have an environment that would allow them to do that.
Sorry I'm late replying to this but I think you raise actually a very valid point. I went and read the Feynman article and I have experienced this myself in the Irish education system. People tend to study only for the exam without understanding the problem.
Survivor bias is certainly a factor here and thanks for pointing it out!
As for the affluent people I'm sure that does play in also. The developer i advocated for however was extremely poor and came from the favelas. I only knew about this after and I realize for sure that is the exception but I think it furthers your point of survivor bias!
I don't know about law exam, but Brazil has more undergraduate courses in law than all the rest of the world combined, naturally this comes with a lot of shit univesities and that means a lot of people with a law degree but don't work in the field.
You can add medical schools to that list. Plenty of shitty doctors being minted too. Unable to diagnose myocardial infarction levels of shitty.
The government basically thinks "education good" and starts making lots of crappy schools as if it was going to magically turn the country into a super power. I've literally seen politicians citing how many schools they created as a talking point. The result is of course overqualified Uber drivers.
Beats over here where the government basically thinks "education bad" and starts making lots of schools crappy out of a realisation that anyone who can add two numbers together wont vote for them come election time.
The result is of course a population that isnt qualified to do anything but sit at home watching propaganda on tv.
Everything you described is also happening here. I just avoided mentioning it so as to avoid derailing the thread into brazilian politics.
Truth is the primary purpose of our schools is to be the main government indoctrination tool. I still remember the asinine "sociology" and "history" classes taught by a socialist feminist teacher. I was literally forced to agree with marxist nonsense in her tests or fail the class. It was so blatant as to be comical. This also shows up in our SAT equivalent as rules about "respecting human rights". They force you to pick the "correct" ideological answer. Wrote anything even remotely controversial in your essay? You're not making it into any university. Even if you do make it, they never stop. Imagine a question about proper terms for trangender people suddenly showing up in the middle of a mathematics test at university.
I have videos of primary school teachers teaching children to sing worker's party songs. I wish I was making this up.
The public education system is not very good, when it comes to schools(from elementary to high, to use US terms).
However, from my experience with the US public school system in the Bay Area, I'd say that many public schools in Brazil outclass those in the US. The standard curriculum definitely seems better - I am constantly surprised by how many subjects US schools do not cover - at all. Of course, the standard deviation is horrendous, so there are public schools that can hardly be called schools. The best private schools in Brazil are amazing (more so for 'STEM') - although their workload is pretty heavy. Every single person that I've known that participated in international interchange programs and spent some time in the US had real issues catching up when they came back. Many advanced subjects in math, biology, chemistry (organic chemistry in general, specially naming) didn't seem to be covered at all. Since my 'high school' was quite some time ago, I had expected things today to be different. But just comparing my kid's textbook (and homework assignments) to what I had... it seems like a perpetual vacation in comparison, it's so easy.
Public universities are free and there are excellent ones(but difficult to get in). Private universities can be more of a mixed bag. Since there's no real 'general education' at universities, almost all your time is focused on your 'major' (there's no 'minor', although in many cases you can use some of your credits for 'unrelated' classes). There's no real college/university distinction - in Brazil the distinction is not course length or type of degree, the distinction is that a 'law college' would offer law school degrees (bachelor's and up), while a university would have law, computer science, math, medicine, etc.
While studying for my BSc in Computer Science, I've often compared and used materials from US universities when I needed more sources, but I've found in several instances that the material was lacking, and I had to actually look for graduate level and up.
For as good as the education itself is (and %@#$!@ harsh!), what they do lack, and the reason they are underrepresented in many fields, is integration with the private sector and the outside world in general. There are some projects here and there, but you don't see anything close to, say, DARPA(in either scope or funding). Other than a few outliers, research output doesn't even compare to even relatively unknown US universities. There's great research being done and incredible brains, but not enough incentives or funding.
The above holds for undergraduate programs. There are good graduate level and up, but those are less common. It's often the case that people will end up at US universities to further their education. Almost all my teachers did their doctorates in the US (and then came back to their cushy and decently well paid 'tenured' positions).
When it comes to US universities, the whole mindset is very different – and, in my opinion, orders of magnitude better. I literally shed a tear at Berkeley just from hearing them talk about their university at their 'welcome day' or whatever it's called (and I wasn't even the one going to attend, it was a family member), just from learning what the university does to help students with their interests outside the university and with the community, plus that vibe that 'anything is possible'. I didn't have that. It was tests, grades, more tests, in a microcosm. You won't see many Bill Gates or Zuckerbergs that way, and specially not dropouts.
I've tried to compare the bar exam before but, not only the tests are very different, the way they are graded is different, pass/fail stats vary wildly between US and Brazil depending on what year we are looking at. And, obviously, the legal system is different. Not sure if it's a fair comparison, when you consider all those variables. What I do know is that friends would study for a long time, sometimes for multiple years(often enrolling in extra, private courses just for that). It's said to be difficult, but I have no real experience or way to gauge.
Fake news, I hope originating from historical ignorance.
Half a century Brazil was under a fascist military regime: not only was there state violence, torture and heavy censorship (schools and uni's were amongst the main targets) all over, but public education was worst by a lot of metrics including child illiteracy and access to basic education and pre-education. Also they put the children through all sorts of ridiculous parades and bullshit. Truly despicable.
I didn't vote on it but it comes off as a bit confusing to read and understand...
> our office at the time that let everyone to relax and enjoy. If you don't know what you're doing. You're fired. End of. Used to love that office.
I can't tell what office you're talking about but your description doesn't make it seem like a place where people relax and enjoy if you could be easily fired.
> I can't tell what office you're talking about but your description doesn't make it seem like a place where people relax and enjoy if you could be easily fired.
It could. Imagine anyone who couldn't run a 13 second 100 meter dash was fired, but they only hired people who ran it in 11 seconds in the interview. Nobody's really going to be too worried.
It can't be assessed by a single dimension, but it doesn't have to be. A high quality engineer absolutely can rank the technical competence of other engineers in his field (not just computer science) with a high degree of certainty, and that's all you need.
The "it's complex" argument is similar to the "it's a tradeoff" argument in that both are easily abused to justify any bad decision.
Not a downvoter... this comment comes off quite nationalistic and, more importantly, is there evidence they are being "fork out"?
My understanding, from conversations with business school leader in the UK, is that South America is where the expertise is in the cutting edge of finance. Assuming that visa are acquiring competition for $1b to kill it or on-shore the workforce seems an odd take.
Universities: are ok in general with a few ones really good, like USP, ITA, UFMG, Puc-RJ, UFRJ and others. It’s really hard to join those but if you’re able to do it, your education will be excellent.
High school: public high schools are really bad, privates are ok.
Basic school: same as high school.
I study my entire life in public schools and when I started my CS degree, I discovered that I knew nothing about sciences and math.
Here you have selection bias. If you're a US company and you have to bring someone from outside the US, you'll probably bring the better ones and, as someone already said, if they are fluent in English, they are probably at the top.
Come work for a Brazilian company to see the that we have mediocre people everywhere.
Some people in the comments are implying that Visa is acquiring a competitor. But Pismo is a core banking & issuer-processor API vendor, not a Visa competitor. Competitors of Pismo would be companies like Episode Six or Paymentology.
Through this acquisition, Visa is expanding their offering to include core banking and issuer-processor APIs, so they are doing vertical integration.
I once spent a month shopping around for such a thing. My team made a big analysis spreadsheet and we went through the various API's with a fine tooth comb and presented our top three to leadership.
They subsequently went with one we had never heard of. Rumor had it that it was owned by somebody on the board.
That is pretty much the case for any legacy industry, not just banking. It's 30% engineering, 70% actually knowing someone who will let your engineers anywhere near the data source.
In some cases regulations like PSD2 give you a "shortcut", but even then it's a sham because in practice the APIs you're given are dysfunctional and you will have to spend significant efforts making up for the shortcomings of the API (in some cases it's insane things like blatantly violating both the specification and even common sense, such as settled bank transactions outright disappearing without a corresponding reversal transaction).
Talk to one of you investors. They tend to be money people and relationship people, both of which make it likely to have a connection to someone at the bank.
Or just ping biz dev people from the bank on LinkedIn until you find an in. Someone will be thrilled to get a warm inbound lead.
Sure: one was a head trader for a specific prop trading desk, and the other was an executive director.
The GTM: the end customers are hedge funds/institutional investors, which are pretty hard to approach directly. So, we developed a B2B2B: we sell to large brokerage firms, which resell to the end customers.
I did this from scratch. There's a few huge problems. Do you have a charter? Can you supply the logistics for the regulatory compliance overhead? Have you selected an appropriate location in the FI pipeline to integrate? Not all banks have equal access to this pipeline.
Instant payment networks are an existential crisis for legacy debit and credit rails/networks. Have to go upmarket to value add when you can’t get interchange revenue (in this case, buying an emerging interface to Pix, Brazil’s instant payment system).
> Pismo’s platform will also enable Visa to provide support and connectivity for emerging payment rails, like Pix in Brazil, for financial institution clients.
To say that Pix is "emerging" is an understatement. Visa basically got their market share in Brazil eaten over night. I don't see how they could any value here, integrating with Pix is straight-forward and not much different from working with other payment providers.
Visa and Pix are in completely different categories though. Pix does not provide a line of credit.
Pix is an existial threat to banks and their idiotic TED transfers which they charge actual money for. "Banking services" they call it. To that, I say good riddance. Why the hell should anyone pay a bank even one cent for any reason? They should pay us. They should be competing to see who can pay us most for the money we deposit into their fractional reserve scam. It offends me that these banks think they can charge money to update records in a database.
As soneca demonstrates, credit can be extended using instant payment systems, without the need for credit card rails (very similar to Buy Now Pay Later).
As a Brazilian that moved to Canada, and used both systems. Pix is way more advanced than Interac. The UX is better, the adoption is way higher. I have paid cab drivers in Brazil with Pix, since transfers are instant. It is used by MANY as a substitute for cash. With Interact, there is a time delay sometimes, which makes it not work that well for live payments like this.
There are also more use cases covered. Instead of you having to type all the info of you are paying, they can print out a code for you, with the value/their info. So you can just copy/paste/read qr code. This allows business to use Pix to handle internet payments very easy, during checkout, they just generate a Pix code, that you pay and it confirms your payment in a couple of seconds.
It is also something that the Central Bank of Brazil setup, so there is no profit motif except for fees charged only to business that use it, to cover operating costs. Every single bank that I'm aware of in Brazil quickly implemented it.
Company I work for (Clicksign, a Brazilian e-signature company) also uses PIX for signatory verification. We just make a 10 cent charge on a signatory and when he/she pays we get a callback and now we have valid and up to date information that confirms they are who they say they are.
Basically a better e-mail token verification: you know the person actually has access to their bank account and is not an impersonator.
We were actually the first to do that, but the advantages of an instant payment system are endless. This same thing could be done for many other use cases.
A credit card generally is meant to give a person credit. In third world countries, lots of people are poor, and do not have access to credit. The credit cards that they do have access to charge absurdly high interest rate, and most working class people should probably stay away from them.
There’s that and also credit cards are usually paid, a monthly or yearly, so not everyone has them. Pix is free so penetration is much higher.
The degree of fraud with credit cards is huge in Brazil, so for us it wouldn’t bring about trust in a legal setting: someone could’ve just cloned your card and signed a document in your stead, without you ever knowing. Pix has the added benefit that the person needs to physically hold the phone, input the bank passcode and/or biometrics, in order to pay it.
Well, I'm not sure about Interac Email Transfers as I have not used it. But I have not seen something change up finances here in Brazil as fast like Pix during my life - it's extremely flexible and efficient.
The rollout was structured in a way that pretty much every single bank in the country started taking up Pix payments with no friction, so you can send money to almost everywhere. Aside from that, you can setup emails, mobile phones, random hashes, and Brazilian ID numbers as Pix keys to transfer to and fro.
And yeah well, the mobile-friendly UI is a thing because most bank apps here have abysmal desktop UIs and I would go as far as saying they have (pretty much) given up on developing those to focus on the mobile user base instead.
Jumping on the bandwagon here when it comes to having extensively used both, I second the "Interac/Fax - Pix/Internet" analogy.
I won't get into the actual implementation details of both solutions, but the way Pix changed the finance landscape of Brazil is something else.
The major difference for me personally is the fact that Pix transfers are instant as in instant messaging instead of Interac's (more often than I'd like) 30min transfers.
Also, paying anything via Interac is kind of awkward compared to Pix's UX flows implemented by Brazilian banks. Can't quite explain it but it's there. Pix is one of the things I miss most from Brazil, and I'm glad Canada's Interac is as prevalent as it is otherwise it'd be a huge step down.
On the UX aspect, Brazil’s central bank has a heavy hand over the PIX experience, going as far as publishing the UX Guidelines[1] as Banking Regulation.
That was my first thought as well. Kinda tangential but I am from India and UPI is giving these major global payment networks sleepless nights here. Granted UPI has a long way to go but it is already so ubiquitous and convenient at this point. Google already has a foot in the door and VISA and MC have stated their intention to enter the market few months ago. I guess they might as well do that with an acquisition or two.
It doesn’t seem of minimal relevancy for the Brazilian government. I don’t see the connection at all. What’s your reasoning to consider that might be one?
- payments infrastructure and endpoint standards, security, and deployment
CBDCs do take away a fair amount of responsibility from existing private EFT, and I personally think can be a net positive, but they're a piece of the puzzle.
CBDCs are a substrate. There will always be integrations to the substrate.
Ideally protocols are as simple as possible and applications utilize them to build bespoke services. If the protocol itself is too customizable it becomes extremely difficult to interop.
interbank and internetwork are not really needed with Cbdcs right? I assume that banks will take care of fraud prevention , and payments infrastructure will not be cards but an app?
Do you mean insofar as people will be able to pay without carrying cash or using a credit card?
I assume reasons will be similar to why many prefer credit cards to debit cards: cash flow issues, extra fraud protections, creating a credit history for future loans, rewards points, etc.
The value of debit cards will be significantly diminished, though.
One could argue that payment disputes are an artifact of credit cards. Before that there was no way to say "I don't like the product that I got, or it didn't arrive in time, so I'm cancelling the order". Once money changed hands, it was a done deal.
> One could argue that payment disputes are an artifact of credit cards.
One could, but one would look very silly doing so, since documented payment disputes (in court records, among other places) are much older than credit cards.
> One could argue that payment disputes are an artifact of credit cards.
Yes, there was. Contracts, including sales contracts, where payment was in whole or in part conditioned on delivery or other performance long predate credit cards, as do disputes over whether the good delivery or other performance was provided and whether payment must be made.
As were, on the other hand, contracts where payment came first, and then later disputes over whether delivery or performance would occur and there would be disputes over whether payment made in advance must be refunded.
And, even without payment and delivery being separated in time, you can have payment disputes because whether the goods (or the instruments provided as payment) were as specified may become a dispute after both sides have exchanged and tentatively concluded the trade.
The idea that payment disputes didn’t exist before the fairly recent invention of credit cards is…amusing.
Seems to me those are all legal recourses, which obviously always existed. But disputing a charge on my card means I don’t have to open a legal case against a company. The money is somewhat in escrow and it’s up to VISA/Mastercard to deal with the merchant. For a consumer that is huge.
The evidence in court records is from someone taking advantage of legal recourse for such disputes, yes.
> But disputing a charge on my card means I don’t have to open a legal case against a company. The money is somewhat in escrow and it’s up to VISA/Mastercard to deal with the merchant.
Having a third-party middle-man handling some subset of payment disputes in the first instance before recourse to the legal system also doesn’t originate with credit cards; even the language you use to describe it references the older and more general concept of escrow.
And, of course, as a consumer on credit even before credit cards, and without an intermediary, you neither had to open a legal case against the seller or contact a third party in most cases for a payment dispute, you simply withheld payment. It was the seller who had to initiate a legal case against a purchaser on credit in the event of a payment dispute, and that largely remains unchanged.
There were totally payment disputes with cash. It just might involve either lawyers or a heavy blunt object, or when less contentious a third party might even mediate.
"You didn't give me what I paid for" and "You didn't pay me for what I gave you" are fundamental parts of any purchase.
From other comments here it sounds like Brazil's central bank offers a system that is replacing credit and debit cards for many use cases. I take that to be their point.
Brazil unbanked population in 2011 was ~41%. Having a bank account was not a straightforward process and included higher costs for the vast majority of the population.
Having a bank account would normally means you get a card that could only withdraw money from an ATM. If you wanted a "debit" card that would cost more.
Credit card were something out of reach for many. Low income folks alternative for credit were to rely on general stores own credit bureau.
With the liberalization in the banking system and the many fintechs that disrupted the market, the unbanked number droped to a single digit in 2021, and with pix, many just skipped the debit card all together.
That's how the current system works unless you use physical cash or something like Monero (but even in those cases, it's not guaranteed to be untraceable).
A CBDC just takes all the BS of having many different systems to process payments, manage bank accounts, etc. etc. and unifies it under one system.
Implying that "every penny" cannot be traced with the current systems we have is a misnomer.
I'll go further than implying every penny can't be traced in the current system to stating it as a matter of fact. The default for cash is that it isn't traced.
There are plenty of nit-picky exceptions, but I know for a fact that I or anyone else can transact in complete privacy with cash if we take the most minimal of precautions.
If in fact the current system can trace every penny then our governing officials have a lot of explaining to do as to why human trafficking still happens with USD transactions.
This is not, nor has it ever been a competition. They provide APIs for the banking sector. You should actually look stuff up first before an immediate reaction.
> the Federal Reserve has made no decisions on whether to pursue or implement a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, we have been exploring the potential benefits and risks of CBDCs from a variety of angles.
This is a discussion paper open for comments. All US agencies publish those in the federal register regularly: https://www.federalregister.gov/
The third link you linked is also literally a policy brief. Perhaps I shouldn't have said you should 'look stuff up,' but rather 'you should read the stuff you look up too.'
Yeah, the "conspiracy theorists", before this was officially announced, people had the same reaction as yours
Always people with high karma who think they know better than everyone else, it really is hurting this website, prevents any form of critical and interesting discussions, everything gets muted
Please bookmark this thread and check back next year when it'll enter test phase
YC backing Coinbase should be your biggest hint btw ;)
" UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF MONEY
The financial sector is not immune from the technological
changes that are transforming other industries. Digital
currencies are likely to gain wider acceptance during the
next two decades as the number of central bank digital
currencies increase. China’s central bank launched its
digital currency in 2020, and a consortium of central banks,
working in conjunction with the Bank of International Settlements, is exploring foundational principles for sovereign
digital currencies."
I've fought my manager to hire a good one from Brazil.
They have an unbelievable wealth of amazing education, add to that a strong reason to want to be successful.
I've worked and hired a lot of people over the years, of all of them; Brazilians were the best, they know what they're doing, in our office at the time that let everyone to relax and enjoy. If you don't know what you're doing. You're fired. End of. Used to love that office.
We got work done while having fun. Count the UN, more or less was there.
Everything was delivered quick and mostly always above that spec, because they 'understood' it better.
10 / 10
End of the day : They have an insane education system, it's good but maybe too aggressive. (look to the law exam). They know how to study.
Lookup the law exam. It's rough.
Edit:
If you're poor in Brazil, options are limited. Coding is an EXIT point, that can lead to better.
Downvote please comment.