4 ms·

Literally any alternative is more secure than a handwritten check which is the most easily forger financial document ever invented.

• jjav 4y ago
  Could you describe which alternatives (by name, more detail than "literally any") are more secure, and specifically against which exact threat model? Earliest in my career I worked with many banks developing cryptographic alternatives to check payments. Definitely a big culture clash between us from the crypto world (crypto = cryptography to be clear) who expected everything had to be mathematically secure and the banking teams who didn't care about any of that which seemed baffling to me. The misconception you express, shared by my younger self, is that the security of a check is somehow related to what's on the piece of paper. That's wrong. Everything on the piece of paper is right there in cleartext trivially reproducible by anyone. Nobody pretends it has any security, it doesn't need any. The security of the checking system is in the process and the laws and verifications fine tuned over more than a century of resisting attacks. So turns out it works very well. A battle hardened system that can't be matched by any "move fast break things" fintech startup. Not concidentally, this is very analogous to the cryptocurrency world which thought all finance regulation was nonsense and are now collapsing with fraud every which way. Turns out all that regulation (at least most of it) has been written from the experience of centuries of financial fraud and has good reasons.