Deny the money changer profit.
Take market share away from these parasites.
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
841 points (99.8% liked)
Buy European
6035 readers
212 users here now
Overview:
The community to discuss buying European goods and services.
Rules:
-
Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. No direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments.
-
Do not use this community to promote Nationalism/Euronationalism. This community is for discussing European products/services and news related to that. For other topics the following might be of interest:
-
Include a disclaimer at the bottom of the post if you're affiliated with the recommendation.
-
No russian suggestions.
Feddit.uk's instance rules apply:
- No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or xenophobia
- No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies
- No harassment, dogpiling or doxxing of other users
- Do not share intentionally false or misleading information
- Do not spam or abuse network features.
- Alt accounts are permitted, but all accounts must list each other in their bios.
- No generative AI content
Benefits of Buying Local:
local investment, job creation, innovation, increased competition, more redundancy.
European Instances
Lemmy:
-
Basque Country: https://lemmy.eus/
-
🇧🇪 Belgium: https://0d.gs/
-
🇧🇬 Bulgaria: https://feddit.bg/
-
Catalonia: https://lemmy.cat/
-
🇩🇰 Denmark, including Greenland (for now): https://feddit.dk/
-
🇪🇺 Europe: https://europe.pub/
-
🇫🇷🇧🇪🇨🇭 France, Belgium, Switzerland: https://jlai.lu/
-
🇩🇪🇦🇹🇨🇭🇱🇮 Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein: https://feddit.org/
-
🇫🇮 Finland: https://sopuli.xyz/ & https://suppo.fi/
-
🇮🇸 Iceland: https://feddit.is/
-
🇮🇹 Italy: https://feddit.it/
-
🇱🇹 Lithuania: https://group.lt/
-
🇳🇱 Netherlands: https://feddit.nl/
-
🇵🇱 Poland: https://fedit.pl/ & https://szmer.info/
-
🇵🇹 Portugal: https://lemmy.pt/
-
🇸🇮 Slovenia: https://gregtech.eu/
-
🇸🇪 Sweden: https://feddit.nu/
-
🇹🇷 Turkey: https://lemmy.com.tr/
-
🇬🇧 UK: https://feddit.uk/
Matrix:
-
🇬🇧 UK: matrix.org & glasgow.social
-
🇫🇷 France: tendomium & imagisphe.re & hadoly.fr
-
🇩🇪 Germany: tchncs.de, catgirl.cloud, pub.solar, yatrix.org, digitalprivacy.diy, oblak.be, nope.chat, envs.net, hot-chilli.im, synod.im & rollenspiel.chat
-
🇳🇱 Netherlands: bark.lgbt
-
🇦🇹 Austria: gemeinsam.jetzt & private.coffee
-
🇫🇮 Finland: pikaviestin.fi
Related Communities:
Buy Local:
Continents:
European:
Buying and Selling:
Boycott:
Countries:
Companies:
Stop Publisher Kill Switch in Games Practice:
Banner credits: BYTEAlliance
founded 4 months ago
MODERATORS
I would love to have an EU bank card. Hope we get one soon.
GNU Taler seems to be a good thing to look into. Not a crypto currency but a payment system which preserves anonymity of the buyer.
Yay GNU Taler is very promising, but I fear banks prefer proprietary systems.
It may become widely used if there's strong customer demand for GNU Taler, or regulation requiring an open electronic wallet. Most banks would probably be dragging their feet.
load more comments
(1 replies)
It has been a while since this appeared; I wonder if it picks up steam. Now or never?
load more comments
(1 replies)
Too bad about crypto.
This is the exact kind of situation it was meant to deal with: finance independent of bad entities. But it’s such a dumpster fire…
I don’t think there’s a purer example of social media engagement hype, predatory capitalism, and disinformation ruining something neat so quick.
It really depends on the cryptocurrency in question. Some coins are much more credible than others. Lumping them all in together is like saying that the Japanese Yen and the Lebanese Pound are the same.
There is GNU Taler which is quite cool, but thats not really ready for use yet sadly.
Oh yeah, that seems really cool. The core premise is much more practical.
load more comments
(7 replies)
social media engagement hype, predatory capitalism, and disinformation ruining something
I mean, it still works for getting around Visa and Mastercard. For instance it can be used to make donations to various media piracy groups. It's just that it's so useful to scammers and many people see the technology as a whole as being one 'brand'.
It’s more than a perception problem now, it’s a culture one within the crypto community (as far as I can tell).
Even if you treat the most prominent crypto as a utility, the sea of hype and speculation will affect you.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(15 replies)
Portugal has it's own network, Multibanco, and I know our central bank is working on a system targeted to the SEPA+ area. We already can send money to each other usong our phone number and our fiscal number.
I'm Portuguese and also lived in other countries in Europe and Multibanco is a vastly superior system to everything else I've seen, but on the ATM side rather than the payments side (everybody seems to have their own payment solution or, like the UK, rely on the likes of Visa and MasterCard) - already back in the 90s in Portuguese ATMs, in addition to withdrawing money, you could check your bank account balance, get a statement with the last transactions on your account and even pay your bills all this well before widespread internet access and online banking: that stuff was way ahead of its time back then.
Right now they've added stuff like touchless mobile payments and transfers, but the rest has caught up with them so you'll find such solutions in most countries plus that whole system is entirely local as it's the product of ages ago (before neoliberalism) the government forcing the banks to get together and create a company - SIBS - under shared ownership of the banks, responsible for setting up and managing a national interbank payment systems.
I wouod even say that the Multibanco system probably helps Portuguese banks maintain market lock-in against external competitors, which does get translated to Portugal having pretty high banking fees compared to the rest of Europe, especially for one of the poorest countries in the EU.
E eu a tentar ser resumido.
Sempre achei interessante o quanto mais avançado o Multibanco era que o resto e geralmente só que viveu fora e dentro de Portugal usando os sistemas bancários de onde viveu é que se apercebe disso.
A nossa união bancária forçada, juntamente com a imposição do regulador, criou e ainda cria soluções interessantes. Entristece que os portugueses não sejam conscientes destes avanços.
Não é só em Portugal - por exemplo poucos têm noção que a razão pela qual a Europa estava na dianteira da technologia móvel no início (entre os anos 80 e para aí 2010) era porque usava um único standard - o GSM - algo que foi imposto pelos reguladores quando leiloaram o espetro móvel. Os Estados Unidos, entretanto, tinham vários standardes competitivos e não interoperáveis e até à era do smartphone estavam atrás da Europa na maioria das métricas de coisas como cobertura móvel, preços e adoção da tecnologia pelos consumidores (e por volta de 2010 tinha uníficado as redes deles à volta do GSM-3)
Eu diria mesmo que a maioría dos políticos na Europa do Presente, depois de 4 décadas de neo-liberalism e um prégar sem parar da Bíblia Da Desgregulamentação e Do Mercado Livre, esqueceram-se dessas lições, e isso inclui a maioria deles em Portugal, na minha opinião.
Padronização faz falta e dá fruto e não elimina concorrência nem inovaçâo.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
There's Wero, a European alternative to VISA and Mastercard.
Is it? Doesn't look like they offer debit/credit cards.
Looks more like a PayPal alternative.
It’s based on iDEAL, which we use in the Netherlands since 2005. All the Dutch banks are connected to it and when you pay, you approve the payment in your banking app or website, after which it’s immediately deducted from your bank account and the webshop gets an instant payment confirmation. Variations of this are also used peer to peer, for example for splitting the bill or when buying second hand stuff. You send someone a payment request (url) or show a QR and payments arrive instantly on your bank account, without any fees.
So indeed, even though it’s immensely popular and widely used, it’s not a full replacement for physical debit cards and it doesn’t offer credit.
Every country in the EU has some system for direct debit payments.
Italy has Bancomat, Germany has EC/Giro, France has Carte Bleue, Belgium has Bancontact/Mister Cash (still have not figured out whether they're supposed to be different or just different names in Flanders and Wallonia), and so on and so forth.
Does the Netherlands not have such a system?
It used to be that people would use these within their own country, but there would be Maestro for payments around Europe.
MasterCard decided to discontinue Maestro for MasterCard Prepaid which has higher fees.
The Germans whined about it a little and said that Europe should have come up with its own payment systems, but nothing came of it.
By now we are also supposed to have SEPA Instant, that should offer Europe-wide bank transfers. I still have not quite understood why a debit card system can't leverage that directly.
load more comments
(1 replies)
It's a PayPal alternative, but developed in tandem with most European banks. That way, it will at some point also be used as backend for your normal debit and credit card payments, instead of VISA / MasterCard. If I remember correctly.
Yup that’s the current state of it. They say they’re planning to add in-store and online payment options though
The EU plans this for many year, but the problem is every country is doing its own thing with its own standard, that is not working anywhere else. In Germany for example we have Giropay as a solution, which doesn't work in other countries. As it turns out, people move though, that's why for a couple of years now every bank is switching to VISA debit cards...
Exactly. Austria has eps which works well within Austria and with Austrian companies online, but no further than that.
As far as I know, Giropay is being replaced by Wero, which is already supported by some banks in different European countries.
It is so far one if the better PayPal/Visa/MasterCard alternatives I‘ve used, but adoption is still a problem.
Yeah I’ve got a notification about Wero in my Sparkasse App but haven’t bothered checking it out yet lol
I have a couple of friends that seem to like it tho, I just rarely send any money
Annoyingly, we already have fast transactions as part of SEPA. But they're somewhat inconvenient to do and especially not available by just holding your card in front of a sensor.
If we had a harmonized standard for that we could get rid of Visa and MasterCard. And if we had a common web interface to make SEPA transactions more convenient than manually typing an IBAN into a homebanking interface we could get rid of PayPal as well.
Yes, I know services like that exist but I really hate how the current ones expect me to type the login credentials for my homebanking into a third-party website.
fuck YES!
ALSO: fuck plastic bank money, cash is king