AB on Nostr: Learned a little more how the legacy credit card system works and got a good bit of ...

Learned a little more how the legacy credit card system works and got a good bit of motivation to hasten my family's move to a full Bitcoin standard.

We go to the local farmers market every week and we had noticed that sometimes if we went to a shop after our farmers market run, our credit card would decline despite having plenty of available balance. This continued happening and got so bad that our card had become unusable. I eventually got fed up enough that I called the bank to find out what is going on.

Turns out that when we make many payments in quick succession to many different vendors, it triggers the banks fraud detection. So each week we would go to the market and our card would get suspended. Someone from the bank would then need to manually review our txs, see that it is the same farmers market pattern and then restore our card. Apparently due to black friday sales, they have been swamped with fraud detections, so they have been slower at restoring cards, making our card unusable. The bank said that essentially this process is going to happen every time we go to the farmers market. I am honestly shocked at how rudimentary their fraud detection algorithms must be. Surely not too hard to see that the pattern of txs matches the same pattern at the same time, every week.

I had no idea how much manual work was going in to keeping our card working. Obviously Bitcoin fixes this and really reiterates how much of a step improvement Bitcoin is compared to the legacy system.

The only reason we use a credit card over a debit card is that in the case of it getting compromised, then the bank is on the hook for stolen funds, which i my experience makes them much more responsive.

We are going to stop being lazy and just get out cash each week from now on. Much better privacy and better for the merchants. Long term I really want to start getting paid in Bitcoin and then hopefully find some good tools for interacting with the legacy system. Really need to orange pill my local farmers, but that is proving difficult after already trying multiple times.