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Oh wow great, I can pay 25 cents to banks and a startup to do something that was free and instant with cash and free and only mildly less instant with paper che

Oh wow great, I can pay 25 cents to banks and a startup to do something that was free and instant with cash and free and only mildly less instant with paper checks. Venmo, PayPal et al are great examples of how the big barriers to convenience in our society are often fundamentally social and political, not technical. The technology to enable two people with smartphones to exchange money is trivial. Even the authentication bits can be made pretty trivial. But try and hook this up to where people are obligated to keep their money (banks) and to whom they must report their activities (governments, merchants, etc) and greed and other externalities conspire to ELIMINATE any savings or other benefits from the tech and actually make the situation MORE costly, less private, less safe, etc. Venmo can give me money instantly for 25 cents is about as exciting as Facebook being able to replace my rolodex at the cost of lost privacy and contentment which is about as exciting as ugly, hard-to-navigate, and unlendable Kindle e-books being able to replace actual books from real publishers.

austenallred 9y ago
> to do something that was free and instant with cash and free and only mildly less instant with paper checks. Running down to the bank to cash a check is pretty damn far away from "free and instant."
- closeparen 9y ago
  No, but “write out a paper check and have the other person photograph it with their bank’s app” is still the only universal and free peer to peer electronic payment method in the US. (Cash requires trips to the teller window during banking hours if your transactions are not all multiples of $20).
  - jedberg 9y ago
    Yeah but if you do that usually you're only limited to about $100 of that check being available until it clears three days later.
    - austenallred 9y ago
      Finance is mostly a security problem. It's always (and continues to be) a security problem.
      - vertex-four 9y ago
        No, finance is an interoperability problem. If it were a security problem, there'd be much clearer solutions.
  - otakucode 9y ago
    Will most banks actually allow that? Taking a picture of a personal check and cashing it instantly? In my experience banks treat personal checks like radioactive waste and getting a bank to cash a check as an individual takes some doing. Last time I had a $2600 check I found out that for any check over $2500, I had to physically take it to the bank and they wanted to know why I was receiving the money. Anything that cuts payment processors out of the loop is absolutely essential in my book. The current scenario is that the majority of our economy flows through a few payment processor companies who do nothing of value beyond moving numbers down a wire, and they charge a percentage cut for that (because apparently it costs them more to move larger numbers?). That amounts to them being a taxing body. It gives them tremendous control over our entire economy. If we don't tear them out of that position, they will counter-act any actions taken by the government to control the money supply if the government ever dares to do anything which would not maximize the payment processors profit.
    - tonyarkles 9y ago
      In Canada they certainly didn't mind for me. When clients were sending me cheques, I don't think I ever ran into any problems cashing them using the RBC "Photo of a cheque" thing. I ran into way more difficulties with Quickbooks Payments accepting large credit card transactions. There were invisible thresholds that seemed to trigger Know-Your-Customer (KYC) rules, and the fact that those had been triggered seemed to be opaque to Tier 1 support. As far as everyone I talked to (at both QB and at RBC) the money had vanished into the aether, until a couple days later I got a call from someone in the QB Compliance department who had a few questions.
    - ender341341 9y ago
      Will most banks actually allow that? Taking a picture of a personal check and cashing it instantly? My small credit union does this. I imagine there's corner cases & limits to how much they'll do instantly without review but it's worked instantly for me so far with several hundred dollars on a check.
basch 9y ago
its free on facebook to transfer money instantly, can immediately withdraw the money from an atm.
martin_bech 9y ago
Here in Denmark you can transfer any amount under about 20.000 USD instantly to other people with your banking app (amounts over 20.000 USD requires a call to the bank, at least for me, the one time i tried). We also have the mobilepay app wich makes payment, and peer to peer transfers effortless all for free. Checks ars so outdated here, that they where outlawed last year.
- BrandoElFollito 9y ago
  I live in France, the Country Of The Cheque. This is old - fashioned by all accounts, but in order to get rid of it, you need to have a good infrastructure to fill the void. Make no mistake, this is very much doable but requires planning. I use a chèque to pay something at my children's school or other not so well connected places. Removing chèques (which I would be delighted of) means that they need specific accounts in banks (tagged with a project, a school trip,...), something which is not readily available today.
  - martin_bech 9y ago
    You can tag direct account payments with notes. So paying a bill or a school, you attach a note such as “payment for Pierres school trip” or “regarding invoice #1234”. Works pretty damn good here in Denmark.
    - BrandoElFollito 9y ago
      True. I am probably trying to be too careful, it is just our tradition of chèques (which, again, I would like to see vanishing) which I now will be hard to get rid of. We probably have the lowest online banking adoption in the world, people are attached to brick and mortar institutions which bring them nothing (I am fully online and when I ask some friends why they do not switch they do not have any rational reasons, except that they are in the same bank for 15 generations and like to pay the 10₠/month fee)
      - martin_bech 9y ago

austenallred 9y ago

> to do something that was free and instant with cash and free and only mildly less instant with paper checks. Running down to the bank to cash a check is pretty damn far away from "free and instant."

closeparen 9y ago
No, but “write out a paper check and have the other person photograph it with their bank’s app” is still the only universal and free peer to peer electronic payment method in the US. (Cash requires trips to the teller window during banking hours if your transactions are not all multiples of $20).
- jedberg 9y ago
  Yeah but if you do that usually you're only limited to about $100 of that check being available until it clears three days later.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    Finance is mostly a security problem. It's always (and continues to be) a security problem.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      No, finance is an interoperability problem. If it were a security problem, there'd be much clearer solutions.
- otakucode 9y ago
  Will most banks actually allow that? Taking a picture of a personal check and cashing it instantly? In my experience banks treat personal checks like radioactive waste and getting a bank to cash a check as an individual takes some doing. Last time I had a $2600 check I found out that for any check over $2500, I had to physically take it to the bank and they wanted to know why I was receiving the money. Anything that cuts payment processors out of the loop is absolutely essential in my book. The current scenario is that the majority of our economy flows through a few payment processor companies who do nothing of value beyond moving numbers down a wire, and they charge a percentage cut for that (because apparently it costs them more to move larger numbers?). That amounts to them being a taxing body. It gives them tremendous control over our entire economy. If we don't tear them out of that position, they will counter-act any actions taken by the government to control the money supply if the government ever dares to do anything which would not maximize the payment processors profit.
  - tonyarkles 9y ago
    In Canada they certainly didn't mind for me. When clients were sending me cheques, I don't think I ever ran into any problems cashing them using the RBC "Photo of a cheque" thing. I ran into way more difficulties with Quickbooks Payments accepting large credit card transactions. There were invisible thresholds that seemed to trigger Know-Your-Customer (KYC) rules, and the fact that those had been triggered seemed to be opaque to Tier 1 support. As far as everyone I talked to (at both QB and at RBC) the money had vanished into the aether, until a couple days later I got a call from someone in the QB Compliance department who had a few questions.
  - ender341341 9y ago
    Will most banks actually allow that? Taking a picture of a personal check and cashing it instantly? My small credit union does this. I imagine there's corner cases & limits to how much they'll do instantly without review but it's worked instantly for me so far with several hundred dollars on a check.

basch 9y ago

its free on facebook to transfer money instantly, can immediately withdraw the money from an atm.

martin_bech 9y ago

Here in Denmark you can transfer any amount under about 20.000 USD instantly to other people with your banking app (amounts over 20.000 USD requires a call to the bank, at least for me, the one time i tried). We also have the mobilepay app wich makes payment, and peer to peer transfers effortless all for free. Checks ars so outdated here, that they where outlawed last year.

BrandoElFollito 9y ago
I live in France, the Country Of The Cheque. This is old - fashioned by all accounts, but in order to get rid of it, you need to have a good infrastructure to fill the void. Make no mistake, this is very much doable but requires planning. I use a chèque to pay something at my children's school or other not so well connected places. Removing chèques (which I would be delighted of) means that they need specific accounts in banks (tagged with a project, a school trip,...), something which is not readily available today.
- martin_bech 9y ago
  You can tag direct account payments with notes. So paying a bill or a school, you attach a note such as “payment for Pierres school trip” or “regarding invoice #1234”. Works pretty damn good here in Denmark.
  - BrandoElFollito 9y ago
    True. I am probably trying to be too careful, it is just our tradition of chèques (which, again, I would like to see vanishing) which I now will be hard to get rid of. We probably have the lowest online banking adoption in the world, people are attached to brick and mortar institutions which bring them nothing (I am fully online and when I ask some friends why they do not switch they do not have any rational reasons, except that they are in the same bank for 15 generations and like to pay the 10₠/month fee)
    - martin_bech 9y ago