Money orders have a fee and require time and gasoline to go somewhere to get them. In 5 minutes I haven't even arrived at the nearest location to purchase a money order.
Is that better than logging into your online banking, making an instant transfer? No need to go anywhere or pay anyone.
Paying a new person is at a minimum a 3 hour process using online payments for me if they don't accept credit card payments.
Also, my checks don't have my full name or billing address on them. Credit card payments require disclosing at least part of these (at a minimum, billing address zip code) to the payee. Wire transfers disclose the full name on the account. I want to send money, not PII.
> Also, my checks don't have my full name or billing address on them.
Return address on envelope does...
Also, aren't you worried someone will intercept check like in article and rewrite it?, non issue with electronic payments
Historically, places could be fussy about accepting checks without an address although I expect that's not generally an issue today. (Of course, lots of other ways to get someone's address especially if they own a house. It's public information in general in the US.)
But, yeah, I've never heard of this account locking thing. I can go to my major brick and mortar bank's web site and add a new payee in 30 seconds. Done.
If I have their bank routing number and account number, sure I can do that (then it's effectively the same thing as a check but without the slip of paper). But I don't always have that info particularly for informal one-off payments (e.g. yard cleaner that came to haul debris away) so it's easiest to hand them a check.
It would also arrive instantaneously on the other side if done during business hours...
No fee...
If i need to transfer to mates i just look them up from phone contacts and send money... Or they can send a payment request... or show a qr code that i scan...
^ This. I'm not sure if this is actually EU wide yet.. but there are several payment systems available, which aren't AFAIK yet usable across countries or at least not many countries. They're in any case members of the European Mobile Payment Systems Association. The goal is to make an EU/EEC-wide mobile payment system.
Unlike Paypal, Venmo etc. these are directly managed by the banks, i.e. nothing like the horrors you sometimes hear about from those private companies. With the variant I use I just need the/a phone number from the recipient, I enter it in my app, I see a name come up, I pay (with a pin), either directly from a bank account or from e.g. a credit card - I can choose at pay time. So, for that example where you need to pay someone doing garden work for you you don't hand over a check, you simply ask for the phone number, enter the details, show the guy "Is that you?", if "yes", then pay, show the guy the receipt on your phone, deal done. Instant, if it's paid from your account, or "Real Soon Now" if from your credit card (the transaction will fail if you don't have the credit - you don't get a receipt to show. You do get an instant receipt if your credit card works, so there's no doubt on the receiver's end that the money will come).
Very convenient. Works in lots of shops too, and, as it's free up to a certain amount, and you only need a phone number you don't have to invest/rent anything, as in getting a card reader. When that's said, until this became popular you could more often than not use a credit card for anything including flea market sellers, parking meters, everything. The only limitation I've run into is with, of all things, doctor's offices where their payment machines for some reason only accept bank (direct debit) cards, not CC. The dentists accept everything though, and everybody else accepts everything too. But the phone payment is so extremely easy, and safe, that it's taking over everything. Splitting a bill at the restaurant? Phone transfer. Someone forgot their credit card at the gasoline pump? Phone the amount to someone who's got a CC and then the person with the CC can fill up the car. I do prefer contactless CC payment in shops though.
Good reminder that sometimes it’s possible to read more into what someone’s saying than is there in the words.
In general, there is much libertarian thinking that shortsightedly focuses on the unilateral "exit" without thinking about what comes next. It's a reaction to how complex and overbearing our institutions have become, spurred on by capital looking to digest the proceeds. I'm a libertarian, but I recognize that it's ultimately a yin-yang - if there is a "completely free" power vacuum, some other power will often fill it, creating a de facto government by another name - one that generally won't have any mechanisms of accountability. The approach of defining rights axiomatically simply does not work, due to the contradictions created by layered complexity. An example of how this plays out after the first step is the current web 2.0 catastrophe. The first amendment definition of free speech may be necessary, but it is not sufficient - unaccountable companies have consumed the power vacuum at scale, digested it, and spit it back out in terms of heavily editorialized spaces that we still try to use as if they're public venues.
(And just to be clear on my immediate practical stance, I think the current "free speech" marketing campaign of Twitter et al is utterly specious. The problem is the amassing of such power in the first place, due to the centralizing technologies webapps are built on. Changing the flavor of the Kool-Aid doesn't fix the fundamental problem.)
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