" If you go all the way through the the author’s own post on the subject (here [supercookie.me]) and scroll down, you will find a table showing different browsers and different operating system combinations."
“The author shows that Firefox on Linux, iOS and Android is not vulnerable, but on Windows and MacOS it is.”
I may write a medium article. I’m sure you won’t mind me using this.
Please do. Would love to share.
Goldrush… (buy shovels!)…
Mastercard decision smells like fiat destruction.
Aren’t they just doing a PayPal though? They still get to play middle man and cream profits off transaction fees.
What Mastercard, Visa, etc, will fear is being cut out of the loop completely. Crypto is an existential threat to their business model.
Edit: ofc, it means throwing fiat under the bus in the process, so maybe at the macro scale it is good news regardless!
That’s why I’m onboard with it. 
mastercard… offering access to a secure, encrypted and robust payment network over their creaking old world sticky tape network… Mmmm.
Any fees charged will be on top of crypto fees to pay for matercards network.
Considering Elon did a big buy of BTC back around 11th Jan and his publicly announced one a day or two ago. There is a lot of push by others to bite the bullet and join the market place to skim off profits from the crypto world.
Imagine visa and mastercard skimming off their 1 to 3% per transaction above fees and then charging interest from the moment you borrowed to buy that crypto. They are going to rake in the money from this.
Has BTC solved its energy use dilemma?.. PoW consuming the energy requirement of a small country never made sense to me.
Well, they can handle thousands of transactions per second where as bitcoin, well, can’t.
Given folks are still using their credit/debit cards for in person purchases (more than ever) and still using them a lot for online, their network is in the middle of a lot of payments still. Given Bitcoin has retreated to being Gold 2.0, I’m not sure that will change soon either.
However, it is interesting that they are willing to break their monopoly with fiat money. That in itself gives crypto credibility, which could undermine their long term position. They must feel crypto is a threat in the medium term and they don’t want to give it any opportunity to break into the payment services market.
I actually worked at Visa for a while a year or so back. Some of the complexity they have to deal with to keep payments secure is pretty crazy. Having to deal with payment gateways (including their payment device networks), 2x banks and 2x individuals/businesses to safely authorise and clear payments, in a compliant way, is non-trivial. The 3D secure stuff has evolved so that you don’t see it very often, but it is still being used in the background.
I remember sitting there, musing over the monstrous complexity of it all. It is inherent in having to trust so many parties. It was one of those moments when you remember just why crypto currencies are such a big step forward - all of those middlemen and complexities vanish. It literally becomes similar to one person handing another a coin.
IMO, Visa, Mastercard, etc, will come under ever more pressure as their business model is eroded away. It may seem unlikely right now and maybe Bitcoin isn’t man enough for that particular challenge, but simple, fast, direct, person to person payments will render them obsolete.
This is an interesting fact to remember and seems to kill the idea of MasterCard scaling the purchases of bitcoin or any cryptocurrency, and limits what a mass market service like MasterCard can offer.
Maybe they will operate more like an exchange and only do an on-chain transaction when you deposit or withdraw cryptocurrency.
Otherwise the Blockchain will ground to a halt.
I suspect that is exactly what they will do, much like PayPay (AFAIK). They will keep a balance of all BTC payments between different banks/businesses/individuals, then tally them all up at the end of day and transfer the balances as needed (as BTC).
EDIT: It will be interesting where this leads though from a banking perspective. Given Mastercard are a middleman between banks, does this mean that the banks will be encouraged to hold Bitcoin accounts for their business customers? Will it mean Mastercard will start to muscle out the banks and offer direct accounts for businesses? What will this mean for the clearing houses and protocols (SWIFT, etc)? Are they going to get cut out too?
This isn’t actually true in one sense - the transaction does occur on their network at that speed - but settlement between banks and visa/mastercard takes a lot lot longer. Whereas bitcoin settlement is actually faster - at least with it’s current load. IMO, this might be very good for bitcoin if visa/mastercard/paypal take the load off the bitcoin TPS limits and in the process settlements might be even faster than they are with banks.
Yes, but that is what I am saying too. They are providing this same service for fiat currency and it could absolutely apply to crypto. However, they are doing this for selfish reasons too (naturally!).
What they don’t want is for people to use crypto directly and settle the transaction between themselves. They want to be the middleman. They are absolutely needed to play this role in the fiat world, but crypto has the potential to settle transactions without them. Clearly, Mastercard don’t want that and while people are wedded to fiat money, it won’t have a chance of happening either.
The fact that Mastercard are considering this shows that they think the days of fiat monopoly are numbered. If they didn’t think so, they wouldn’t make this move. The fiat monopoly is highly profitable for them and undermining it is a risky move. They must feel like the long term risk of not being involved in crypto transactions is even higher. That is very interesting.
What is really empowering for folks is being able to cut out Mastercard as a middleman too. Unfortunately, Bitcoin doesn’t seem capable of this at this time. Settlement of transactions takes too long and is too expensive to be feasible. Maybe lightning network will help it achieve that goal, but maybe not. Maybe it will take a better crypto technology to finally allow instant settlement with little/low fees. Then Mastercard, Visa, et al will be in real trouble, as there is no value they can add or extract from those transactions.
Yip, of course not. But crypto is a ways from being accepted by the public and by business. So in the medium term this is really good I think as it will allow for everyone to become more comfortable with crypto. In the longer run the intermediaries are doomed as you say in any case - IMO, this only speeds things up.
They fought off bitcoin for a long while - pushing it to the margins, but with paypal and others jumping in, they don’t have that luxury anymore and they’ve a big FOMO.
My bet is on Safe Net Tokens (SaNTs!) long term … TPS/fees/security … I don’t see anything better on the long horizon.
Yes, I agree it is good news. It is another step closer to crypto replacing fiat, which is a good thing IMO (I’ll save that debate for another thread! ha!).
I think Safe Network Tokens are certainly in the running. It certainly seems the most elegant solution, especially considering the network will be capable of so much more on top. If only we had a crystal ball! 
FYI settlement in the UK is now a few seconds, but at very much higher rates of transactions. Only in the last year or so.
Really? Actual bank settlement when using visa/mastercard? You’re not talking about just the card company giving approval for the transaction? I’m surprised if so.
We operate the real-time gross settlement (RTGS) service, infrastructure that holds accounts for banks, building societies and other institutions. The balances in these accounts can be used to move money in real time between these account holders. This delivers final and risk-free settlement.