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Comment by hunter2_ | Hacker News Reader

For customers who don't go to great length to protect their own privacy when paying (i.e., all subscribers, I assume) Mullvad should persuade them to replace their subscription with the "bill pay" feature of most checking accounts -- maybe even offer tutorials for common banks. I'm not an expert in the implications of a subpoena and if banks get involved, but it seems like it would at least be a way to keep the revenue stream nearly as healthy (recurring automatically) while also meeting their goal of not maintaining subscription data.

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Banking is highly national. It does not even work very uniformily in SEPA (Single European Payment Area). Of course there are mandatory SEPA features that every bank in every country must support. But there are other national features which are used in some countries by practically all businesses basically making everything incompatible again.

And of course there are many countries completely outside of SEPA.

I'm in the US and I'm not familiar with banking elsewhere, but the "bill pay" feature I'm talking about will try some electronic system first, and if the recipient doesn't support it, the bank simply mails a check. The recipient could be as small/offline as any person at a residential address. I assume writing a check and mailing it is a fairly typical thing everywhere, and having the bank do this on a repeating schedule doesn't seem like a huge hurdle, but I could be wrong.

> I assume writing a check and mailing it is a fairly typical thing everywhere

It absolutely is not. The only time I've seen a check was a gift from my grandfather in the 00s, and I don't think paying bills by mailing checks was ever a thing here.

Checks also often become very difficult and expensive to cash when going cross-border. E.g. most banks here (Finland) refuse to cash foreign checks altogether.

So if you wanted to give money to another individual (not a company which offers card payments) and you didn't want to use the internet, is cash the only option?

You call your bank, or go into a branch, and transfer it to their bank account.

You fill-in in a bank transfer form and mail it to your bank (if you don't carry it in person to a branch office). The money gets transferred from the account of the receiver to the account of the recipient within a day. That's a standardized service every bank has to offer in the SEPA area and the price must be same regardless where the recipient's account is. No difference whether business or individual on either end. You need to know the recipient's account number (IBAN). Of course banks prefer that customers use the internet to initiate such transfer, but other methods exist (often at a higher price).

Frankly, this sounds like a long-winded way of saying "you write a check," with a technical difference being that the transaction is a push from the sender rather than a pull from the recipient. If this form has an option for recurring on a (e.g.) monthly basis, then it's what Mullvad could suggest subscribers switch to, if both parties have a SEPA presence.

Yes, monthly SEPA payments (with a static amount and static reference/message) are a commonly used service at least in Finland, for e.g. paying rent between private individuals, and it works as-is with Mullvad wire transfers.

It is my understanding that checks are pretty much only used regularly in the US at this point. Elsewhere, they are reserved only for special cases outside the norm.

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