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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Which is more likely:

Receiving a fake cashier’s check, or the opposing party hacking into your bank and showing a transaction that will disappear?

Regardless of how unlikely the fake cashier’s check is, a fraudulent electrinic money transfer is still more unlikely. And the electronic transfer is cheaper (free). And less work for everyone.

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I think you may be misinformed about "electronic money transfer" at least in the United States.

As far as I know the only way to execute an immediately-settled electronic transfer is a wire transfer, which is inaccessible to lots of people and has an associated fee for nearly everyone else.

I used to pay a landlord with Zelle 10+ years ago.

And Zelle obviously has a lot of limitations, such as being for smaller amounts of money so not useful for down payments or such, I was referring to checks versus electronic payments as a concept in general, not the US’s specific implementation. Which there isn’t one, but due to political failure, not technical limitations seeing as how every other country has the capabilities.

I was under the impression that immediately-settled electronic transfers were Zelle’s raison d'être. I understand that it’s not universally available, but still.

You're not using "immediately settled" in the same way as the parent.

Zelle transactions are subject to reversion or cancellation ... for days?

Compare to, say, settlement cycles in SWIFT: https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/preparing-t1-global-i...

I'm using "settled" in the colloquial "the money has been debited from the sender's account and has been credited to the receiver's account" sense, which for the purposes of this discussion is the definition that really matters.

You can't just unilaterally reverse a Zelle payment any more than you can a SEPA transfer.

My understanding is that Zelle transfers are just settled by ACH under the hood, which is the same system that settles checks.

However there is possibly some new "real-time payment" feature of the ACH network that could be equivalent to wire settlement, but I'm not sure Zelle actually uses it.

As far as I know Zelle prefers RTP[1] for settlements and falls back to ACH only when necessary, but I'm sure there's a Zelle employee on here who can confirm one way or the other.

There's also FedNow[2] but I don't know of any retail implementations yet.

1. https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp

2. https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow

Less work for everyone if there is infrastructure for this transfer to occur, which doesn't exist in the US. So kind of a moot point.

There is, Zelle. And I was under the impression the conversation was not specific to the US, but rather about checks as method of payment in general.

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