I guess by ‘independent’ you mean that with physical checks people are able to make up kind of ‘folk protocols’ for transactions involving steps like ‘party x h

I guess by ‘independent’ you mean that with physical checks people are able to make up kind of ‘folk protocols’ for transactions involving steps like ‘party x holds on to a check written by party y’. - without the banks having to know that that’s what they’re doing, or having to involve some third party to handle that like PayPal or someone? That seems like a pretty weak argument for checks. The range of cases where those processes are useful, in terms of mutual trust (or lack thereof), quantities of funds involved, etc, seem pretty narrow. Like, I don’t trust you enough that I want to ask you to cut a check in advance, and I know you don’t trust me enough to not cash it right away so we’re going to have someone else hold it… but I trust you enough not to cancel the check, and that you’ll be holding sufficient funds so that when I do get the check I know it will actually clear… Surely we’d be better off using a proper escrow service for that? I get that pre-electronic-banking this sort of folk-banking was all people could do but it should be easy to do this sort of thing better electronically