The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 15 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Horowitz: Crypto is more transparent than Visa or dollars
“It's like literally the most transparent form of payment that there is in the world, like more than visa, more than dollars, more than anything.”
Rampell: The AI labor market is vastly larger than traditional software
“That's where the market just expands massively once you throw in labor, because it's like you have this tiny, tiny market for software, which by the way is not that tiny. It's like a trillion dollars. Concentrically around that, you have like, you know, big on…”
Dixon: Monthly stablecoin volume has reached trillions, surpassing Visa
“For those tracking it, like, stablecoins have grown dramatically in usage. It's now in the trillions of dollars, you know, higher than Visa per month.”
Collison: Investors should not short Visa or Mastercard
“If I was an equity investor, there's no way I would be short these companies. Because you have the secular growth of just, like, digital payments.”
Perret: Visa's Plaid contract explicitly excluded global pandemics from MAC clauses
“And then we looked at through the docs and like they have these things called like material adverse event. So you can get out of a deal if something crazy happens. And there was a provision there that says you cannot get out of the deal, even in the case of a …”
Khalaf: Visa and Mastercard emerge as the ultimate winners of settlement
“It's been like a nice debate, and then at the end, Visa and MasterCard win. So but so I think that's what I read into the settlement”
Visa's transaction data exhaust is worth billions but cannot be monetized directly
“Visa's exhaust is very, very valuable, but if they shared that, then they're Clients wouldn't like them very much, and then they lose their clients. So even though their exhaust is worth, it's probably worth billions of dollars a year.”
Perret: Plaid's 2020 acquisition agreement with Visa was fixed at over $5B
“We have this deal to sell the company for just over five billion dollars and it's a fixed price.”
Rampell: TrialPay Sold to Visa Due to Lack of Distribution
“We didn't quite hit it just because we had the innovation, but we didn't have the distribution, which is why we sold the visa.”
Evans notes Apple provides payment endpoints rather than competing with banks
“On the one hand, they look like a great partner, because they've not gone and built their own payment platform, they're not trying to compete with Visa or Master They're not trying to compete with Chase or Wells Fargo or Lloyd's or, you know, any of the retail…”
Terry Angelos: Consumers Remain Confused About Credit Card Benefits Despite Marketing
“One of my sort of takeaways from being at Visa is, for all the marketing that's spent, it's incredible how confusing or confused customers are as to what the benefits are on their card.”
Rampell: Starbucks Pay was designed to avoid per-transaction payment processing fees
“That's why Starbucks invented Starbucks Pay, because they wanted to stop having to pay. It's like these prepaid, they only have to pay one time. You chart, you put 50 dollars on your Starbucks account, well, they only have to pay Visa, MasterCard, and everybod…”
Levchin: Visa and Mastercard enforce a strict 2.5-second transaction limit
“Visa and MasterCard have a hard two and a half second limit on interaction between the network issuing bank and the merchant and the acquiring bank.”
TrialPay Engaged in Roughly 10 Acquisition Talks Before Visa Deal
“We would get into an acquisition discussion which I believe happened like 10 times before the ultimate one that worked”
Chan: China Has Fewer Than 436 Million Credit Cards for 1.36B People
“Now, if I look at the number of people in the US and how many credit cards we have, there is more than one credit card for every person in the US. But then if I look at the Chinese population of 1.36 billion people, and I add up all the American Express cards,…”