Everyone Laughing, Nobody Answers

everyone in the comments laughing, but no one actually answered the question. i assume its because OP is right This is a very on-brand Hacker News comment As a layman, I always wondered: what do Visa and MasterCard even do? They don't issue cards or actually extend credit. Banks do that. They don't assume any transaction risk. Merchants assume it. They don't actually carry any of the debt that customers produce. They don't accept balance payments from customers. They're just "facilitators" but it's unclear what that even means technically. I assume they have a few datacenter that do trillions of little lookups, but is that all there is to it? It seems like the perfect do-nothing middleman business: Insert yourself into every transaction in the world and siphon a percentage of it. What stops a big bank from doing whatever it is they do?

A social media post says that everyone is laughing in the comments, but nobody has answered the original question, supposedly because the original poster is right. The quoted Hacker News comment earnestly questions what Visa and Mastercard actually do, describing them as seemingly unnecessary middlemen that take a percentage of every transaction. The joke is the stereotypical Hacker News reaction: amused technical commenters avoid answering a provocative but reasonable question. EN: A social media post says that everyone is laughing in the comments, but nobody has answered the original question, supposedly because the original poster is right. The quoted Hacker News comment earnestly questions what Visa and Mastercard actually do, describing them as seemingly unnecessary middlemen that take a percentage of every transaction. The joke is the stereotypical Hacker News reaction: amused technical commenters avoid answering a provocative but reasonable question.

• @gentoomemes / 12589 2024-07-31