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Old 11-07-2007, 04:34 AM   #61
GregS
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Perth Australia
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Sorry to keep intruding. There is an important difference between store system, and a general payment, or cash system. Unless the money can be moved independently of vendor it is trapped.

Transaction costs are minimal, they can be considered free. After all that is involved is a small piece of encrypted information to travel through to a server. The processing is negligible as well, for it is the overall costs of having the servers, the software and the bandwidth which in this way are all fixed capital.

Maintaining the service 24/7, with security, is another fixed cost. The fact is that it makes no real difference whether a few thousand transactions are dealt with in a week, or a billion a day, so long as the processing and bandwidth support the higher amount of traffic.

So when banks complain of costs of transactions, they are basically lying, there are no variables, just fixed costs which would be there regardless of the number of electronic transactions. What they are doing is double-dipping, they use your funds to invest and profit from that, and then charge you for using your own money.

Remember electronic transactions mean more money actually spends more of the time resting in the bank - in the old days it would be taken out, spent and only later processed back in, from the banks point of view, this meant it left the system - most of our money stays in the banks hands most of the time, and when convenient the differences between banks is reconciled.

What costs in other words adhere to transactions themselves, or even accounting for them? Practically none.

Given a big enough account in a real bank, earning just normal bank interest, there is more than enough capital to keep transactions going without customers or vendors paying anything.

The trick is to grow the account to the point where it is paying for all that is needed, don't believe a thing about the costs of transactions, they long stopped the practice of little men flying about the world with briefcases chained to their hands, and rows upon rows of accounts processing through calculators - then transactions had a real cost interestingly the charges did not exist as the banks absorbed these as part of doing business and attracting depositors.
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