14 ms·

I was at the presentation at SHA 2017. The demo was nice, even though i did not understand any of the crypto. Although, to be fair, i didn't even try :-) One

• anentropic 9y ago
  This sounds awesome if it works and takes off
  • jabot 9y ago
    Yes, I would like to have some working open source micropayment system. However, as far as i can see there is no bank offering a backend yet. Hopefully that will change soon. It would have been great if the taler system had been usable at SHA 2017. We had to use weird, cheap and easily falsifiable plastic coins at the food court. Using taler instead would have been a really great tech demo...
• StudentStuff 9y ago
  I keep hearing about Taler from a friend of mine, but there hasn't been much adoption among banks or credit unions, limiting its usefulness. The banking sector in the US is a mosaic of banks and credit unions running a wide variety of debit networks, with ACH vaguely tying them all together. I wish it was easier to move money between banks here, seems like the quickest way is to write a check!
  • throwanem 9y ago
    ACH is quicker but much less secure, because the initiator has to have the recipient's account number and bank routing number, which also suffice to initiate wire withdrawals that do not require confirmation to complete and can't easily (if at all) be clawed back.
    • StudentStuff 9y ago
      The average person doesn't have access to an ACH console though, and most banks & credit unions offer local transfers only, with "Bill Pay" that is just them mailing checks out for you. ACH is essentially for businesses only currently.
      • colanderman 9y ago
        A few years back I was able to configure payments for my Citizens' Bank credit card from a non-Citizens' checking account without any verification. Needless to say I was livid and contacted their customer service, who were basically like "yup that's how it works". (I closed my account with them soon thereafter. Citizens' is awful for other reasons.)
      • snuxoll 9y ago
        Most (if not all) of the major banks and some credit unions have joined Zele (formerly clearXchange) [1] to handle person-to-person transfers. Only since the rebrand has it been obvious that each banks person-to-person service is part of a multi-bank network, but I've been using it to pay my landlady since I moved into my house last May (money is transferred instantly, so there's no worry about timing a check with bill pay's slowness - and she never gets a piece of paper with my account information on it either). It's taken forever, but I'm hopeful with the big banks getting onboard Zele for person-to-person payments we may see something similar to the push-based systems other countries have for making everyday transactions online someday. [1] https://www.zellepay.com/ https://www.zellepay.com/
        • StudentStuff 9y ago
          There is also Popmoney, which seems to have a few dozen more Credit Unions (though no BECU :c), they also have the big banks.
        • diggernet 9y ago
          How does Zelle compare to Venmo on things like fraud protection and customer service? (I imagine simply not being owned by PayPal is a real good start.)
  • pjmlp 9y ago
    Uau, checks are still in use?!
    • StudentStuff 9y ago
      Yep, checks are very common, its how most people pay rent, larger bills, etc in the USA. Credit Unions and Banks here offer "Bill Pay", which is just them mailing out a check on your behalf. Cash is popular here too, many of the grocers I work with see 40% to 60% of their revenue in cash, though that market segment has discouraged check use (with the exception of Costco).
      • pjmlp 9y ago
        In most European countries checks are not trusted anymore by common business, given the usual fraud schemes, and in some banks you need to jump through a few hoops to get them (only crossed or pre-validated). Digital payments have replaced the majority of checks.
        • elliottcarlson 9y ago
          It depends on the trust relationship -- stores will not accept checks from customers most of the time anymore, however as the parent said, rent and utilities are still often paid via check as there is an established relationship between the payer and payee.
          • maxerickson 9y ago
            National retailers mostly accept checks; they just treat them as debit card transactions though, scanning the numbers and printing the check for the customer, even handing it back to the customer after it is accepted. I guess it isn't even limited to national retailers, the independent grocer here does it too, I guess because it is worthwhile for them to pay for it.
            • snuxoll 9y ago
  • TomK32 9y ago
    SEPA, guaranteed wire transfers over night and in November this year a payment under 15000€ will happen in 10s (ten seconds!). Not even Bitcoin can do that anymore with transactions taking more and more time (or fees). If the US gov would put some weight behind it, the US could easily catch up.
    • nannal 9y ago
      >transactions taking more and more time Bitcoin blocks will always be ~10 minutes, if you pay the fee to get into the next block, it'll be 10 minutes until your payment is confirmed, before that, all the nodes will announce it anyway so 0 conf is much faster.
      • shpx 9y ago
        Although bitcoin aims to generate a block every 10 minutes, in practice it usually takes longer than that. As I'm writing this, the last block[0] took 30 minutes to mine (sometimes it spikes to hours though[1]). Most importantly, a transaction needs[2] to be confirmed 4-6 times[3] meaning it should be 4-6 blocks in the past, so you're looking at a 1-2 hour transaction time. On top of that, if you want to pay less than a certain transaction fee[4] (right now it's $1.62[5]) you probably won't get into the next block, see https://bitcoinfees.github.io https://bitcoinfees.github.io. Recall that 1 block = 20 minutes and add that on top of the confirmation time. [0] https://blockchain.info/block/0000000000000000005f0e639f66af0e85c767bfd5cb75cf3fd1ebe8557c68f6 https://blockchain.info/block/0000000000000000005f0e639f66af... look at the Timestamps of this block and the Previous Block [1] https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespan=1year https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespa... [2] https://youtu.be/bBC-nXj3Ng4?t=18m41s https://youtu.be/bBC-nXj3Ng4?t=18m41s [3] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf page 8 [4] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees [5] https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ (a satoshi is 0.00000001 BTC, 10,000 satoshi is 40 cents right now) https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin-is-Worse-is-Better https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin-is-Worse-is-Better
      • joosters 9y ago
        It's impossible to know how much to pay to get into the next block. If there's 10 payments waiting to get into the next block and there's only space for 9, there's no way they are all going into the block, regardless of their fees. Users don't want to play a complicated expensive, impossible to win game in order to get their payments processed in a known timeframe.
  • fcbrooklyn 9y ago
    Once upon a time, a friend of mine needed to repay me for a loan of about $1000. Since we both banked at HSBC, we figured walking into the bank together might be a simple way to do that. Nope. I had opened my hsbc account online, he had opened his account in person. Therefore we may as well have been two separate banks, apparently. After debating the sanity of this system with a bank manager (whose fault it clearly was not), I noticed a big sign on their ATM. It said "Now accepting cash deposits!". I asked the guy if there was a limit on the size of those deposits. There was. I can't remember how much, but it was in the neighborhood of five grand I think. My friend took a withdrawal in cash. He handed me the money. I walked over to the machine and deposited it. Makes sense if you look at it sideways.
    • loeg 9y ago
      There are also checks for that kind of thing.
      • scott_karana 9y ago
        Cheques don't typically clear immediately (to crudely attempt to prevent overdraft/double spending attempts) and can have a cost associated with their purchase.
      • rmc 9y ago
        Cheques are uncommon in Europe now-a-days.
      • fcbrooklyn 9y ago
        They take five days to clear, however.
    • asveikau 9y ago
      About ten years ago I moved from New York State to Washington State. I wanted a bank account that would follow me and Chase had not yet bought WaMu so I went to BoA in NY, opened an account, moved my money into it. I arrived in Seattle and at the BoA branch there they said they didn't recognize BoA of New York. I couldn't deposit into the WA branch. I could write myself a check and it would be processed with the reduced speed of a check from an out of state bank.
  • raggi 9y ago
    Bringing agpl into a banks systems would cause lots of fears. Adoption there is unlikely.
  • peterbotond 9y ago
    I read "vaguely tying them together" as "usually it works, sometimes not". This latter is my experience. Electronic transfers enjoy a certain priority also, direct deposit, wire transfer, cash or check deposit at atm or branch are all different for different banks. In other words, it is a vague description when things clear. Some banks are better to their customers some are not so much. I live in the US. An improvement is most certainly welcome and appreciated.
• littlestymaar 9y ago
  > One important take away for me was that this project aims to replace paypal, not bitcoin. Its target is to establish an open source payment infrastructure that is better than paying with credit cards, paypal, etc... Well actually if you read the initial paper from Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin was invented as a replacement for paypal, not money : > Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payment [1] But bitcoin became really popular among the libertarian movement which hated the Fed and other central banks because they saw them as threats to freedom, and now people mostly think about bitcoin as a replacement for money. [1] : https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf