Congress grilled bank executives about it last year and even most of the representatives failed to grasp that it was digital cash. If someone gets defrauded, it's just as if they handed $20 to a scammer. It's going to be hard to reverse that.
Congress grilled bank executives about it last year and even most of the representatives failed to grasp that it was digital cash. If someone gets defrauded, it's just as if they handed $20 to a scammer. It's going to be hard to reverse that.
It's that table stakes have changed. Mainstream customers-- and the regulators who represent them-- expect reversibility as a built-in feature. The technology exists for it. Saying "we're building digital cash in 2023" is like saying "we're going to sell a 4K OLED television with seperate VHF and UHF knobs, because it was fine for Grandpa's 17" CRT."
Various players may desperately want a non-reversible transaction to save a few cents per transaction, or to immunize themselves against bad-faith chargebacks, but it's pretty much ignoring everything we've learned about fraud and user experience in the last 50 years of electronic payments.
At best, there might be a market for a seperate, parallel universe of nonreversible transfers, but it would likely be something tightly regulated and B2B, rather than something that you can misdirect ordinary customers into choosing (like, say, Zelle or PayPal's friends-and-family mode)
Comparing it to cash is dumb.
Imagine you’ve sold a car, the buyer drives off and later reverses the payment.
For very large transactions we have escrow—but isn’t quick by design.
A new potential court-ordered opposite transaction is not what people think of when they hear reversible.