4 ms·

So do you think we'll move away from paper checks completely and just move around echecks from phone to phone? I've never really understood how checks are secur

• jarek 16y ago
  Cheques are earth-shatteringly non-secure. The entire system runs on trust. I've had a several-months-post-dated cheque I wrote cashed by a bank and accepted by mine without apparently as much as a look at the date field. (They also dinged me an overdraft fee. Reversed that when I complained, but not the cheque withdrawal itself.) A while back, there was a pretty loud story about an payday-advance business suing the maker of a subsequently cancelled cheque for the money and winning the amount. The sooner North America weans itself off cheques and external for-profit inter-bank transfer systems (Paypal, grrr), the better off we'll be.
• isamuel 16y ago
  Yes. The technical requirements for a piece of commercial paper---sometimes called a "negotiable instrument," or a check---are that it be a writing, payable to the order of someone specific or simply the bearer, that it be signed by the maker or drawer, that it be for a sum certain, that it be unconditional, that it be payable on demand, and that it be payable in currency. Technically, you can make a valid check out of a napkin with a Sharpie.