This is a great (long) article about what Stripe is up to with a lot of interesting detail about how the internet works as a system, automation and reducing friction through good design, company culture, and a lot more… with some good links and a lot of other good free articles at The Diff.
Scandalous fact of the month: every time in your life that you have selected your credit card provider on a website (e.g. Visa or Mastercard) was unnecessary.
Stripe saves … pixel-counterspace [for their customers] in a few ways, by doing simple things like automatically detecting the card type (why choose “Visa” or “MasterCard” from a drop-down when the digits of the card number literally encode this information?!) to minimizing the amount of personal data collected in order to verify a cardholder’s identity (why choose a state from a dropdown, when the digits in the zip code literally encode…!?)
Stripe and Solid-State Economics – The Diff