Credit cards always have a cost. You get 1.5% to 2% of your money back in rewards for a 3% fee.
In Europe, fees are limited to far below that, and the European debit cards are limited to below 1% in fees.
You don't get rewards from credit cards in that situation. In fact, credit cards always end up losing you money.
Credit cards are the tragedy of the commons - if no one used them, everyone would profit. But as long as some use them, everyone gets an advantage from using them.
> I challenge you to explain why the easy availability of credit and a highly functional credit market is a bad thing instead of throwing out blanket statements like that credit scores are "crazy."
Because it is risk. You have insanely high interest rates, high fees, you have a massive risk, and the security is basically nonexistent.
To pay money online, you usually use a standardized API that uses proper cryptography, and signs with a key embedded in your device or your debit card on a reader.
With a credit card, you pay with a simple number that anyone can just steal, and if you don't take care, you're fucked.
> With a credit card, you pay with a simple number that anyone can just steal, and if you don't take care, you're fucked.
You seem to deeply understand credit cards. There is practically no risk to using them. As a consumer, your fraud liability is zero and entirely shifted to the merchant.
Of course you should pay off the bill every month. I never pay interest, rewards more than cover any fees I pay (I average 4-5% return on credit card spend), and I really don't know what risk you're talking about.
> As a consumer, your fraud liability is zero and entirely shifted to the merchant.
If you have one with chip+PIN, as all in Europe, 100% of liability is with the customer.
So you have to check the statement every month, go through a lengthy process to appeal false charges, and end up not getting your money back either. Especially as you have to deal with your bank to get the money back instead of the CC company here, and the bank has a far easier process for reversing debit transfers than CC bills.
I am providing examples why the American system is worse in a European legal context.
You don't want CCs either. CCs solve security by having someone simply pay for every time a fuckup happens, instead of using cryptography to prevent them in the first place.
> In Europe, fees are limited to
> far below that, and the
> European debit cards are
> limited to below 1% in fees.
I have frequently seen this claim made (that European credit card fees are low), then when I go and investigate it, I discover the source is referring to Europeans limits on interchange fees, not the merchant fees which dominate the cost of accepting credit cards.
In the end, I always find the costs are broadly similar in the EU and the US.
In Europe, fees are limited to far below that, and the European debit cards are limited to below 1% in fees.
You don't get rewards from credit cards in that situation. In fact, credit cards always end up losing you money.
Credit cards are the tragedy of the commons - if no one used them, everyone would profit. But as long as some use them, everyone gets an advantage from using them.
> I challenge you to explain why the easy availability of credit and a highly functional credit market is a bad thing instead of throwing out blanket statements like that credit scores are "crazy."
Because it is risk. You have insanely high interest rates, high fees, you have a massive risk, and the security is basically nonexistent.
To pay money online, you usually use a standardized API that uses proper cryptography, and signs with a key embedded in your device or your debit card on a reader.
With a credit card, you pay with a simple number that anyone can just steal, and if you don't take care, you're fucked.