There's also a significant amount of viral content that is clearly an older person's Facebook post which was intended for only friends but got pushed to the public feed of a Threads account that may have been created by accident -- or default -- when Facebook blitz-scaled user numbers after launch. The posts are always hundreds of people piling on about someone posting a photo of their teenager in an embarrassing situation, with the original poster probably blissfully unaware that they're getting publicly dragged on Threads.

Check your parents' phones to see if they're publicly cross-posting on accident!

1. Merchant (bears little fraud risk but a lot of chargeback risk)

2. Payment Gateway (little direct risk but some liability risk)

3. Merchant Acquirer (more direct risk but mostly if merchants become insolvent)

4. Card Network (Visa/MC/AmEx - less risk but significant underlying costs managing a global technology that spans the financial system and needs to be distributed to almost every merchant of any scale in America)

5. Issuers (Banks + AmEx - most risk but get a big share of interchange fees)

I've surely missed something here that the very smart (and increasingly grumpy these days!) HN community will doubtlessly pile-on to correct, so I apologize in advance for errors or omissions... and I bow down if @patio11 swoops in to tell me about the complexity I've missed in either payments or Japanese economic/cultural conventions

Will also add that the benefit of credit is not overdraft but smoothing cash flow... if I'm living paycheck to paycheck and get paid every two weeks, I will incur essential expenses at the beginning of the fortnight that I can afford but lack cash in my account to pay now. I can't overdraft because I won't have the funds to deposit into that account for another two weeks. I'm getting a service that smooths my cashflow and there's a small premium added to reflect that. (Could you save up enough to avoid needing this? Is that a uniquely American way of living? I don't know! I'm making a descriptive claim not a normative one!)

- For many consumers there isn't sufficient money in the account to settle all the one-time and ongoing transactions they are liable for -- credit cards are giving you a revolving loan, there's risk it will not be repaid, and that risk ends up reflected in processing fees

- For many _businesses_ managing cash flow is existential -- as merchants they want to be paid as quickly as possible, but as B2B customers they want to have 30-60 days to sell the input goods they've purchased so they can pay for them upstream. There is a premium for that flexibility that gets reflected in processing fees.

- For both consumers and merchants, fraud risk is real and while it's the most solvable part of all this it's a real (and costly!) factor today. That risk for fraud gets moved upstream to the networks/acquirers/processors/issuers and that premium shows up in (you guessed it) processing fees.

If you want to switch the world to a debit-based system where economic transactions are limited by cash on hand, I'd argue that's a poorer and less dynamic world than the one we're operating in today.

(1) What are the use cases you envision? I can see the value for a really large marketplace in having a ton of pricing data, or the value to a hedge fund etc in having raw data to analyze macro trends... what is the use case for someone paying $200/month for the developer tier? (If I'm a retailer myself I probably only need data on my direct competitors, unless there's something cool you're imagining that I've failed to see.)

(2) You've got some logos on the store splash that don't show up in store search (eg Nike). Is that a data error or a coding error?

(3) You should probably think about how you scrape and categorize marketplace data... the Walmart tab has a lot of products that are clearly third-party sellers transacting via walmart.com, which pollutes quite a bit of the data value if I primarily want to know what a big retailer is doing on products where they actually set the prices.

(4) Have you looked at grocery data? Have wished someone would build a grocery prices API for like a decade now... lots of cool consumer and hedge-fund monetization opportunities if you can show the price of strawberries in every store across the US (and graph the trendlines over time).

I don't know whether it speaks highly of Upside as an AI solutions agency that you're actually dogfooding some of the AI content creation tools here, or whether I should expect that I'll pay a huge premium to get the same advice and support I could get from a $20/month subscription to ChatGPT. (In either case - don't post AI slop to Hacker News, it's a waste of this community's time.)

I'm also a daily reader of CNBC, and a multiple-times-a-week reader of the New York Times, Politico, and of course Hacker News

https://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-supposedly-true-thing-jonat...