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Comment by dublinben | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I'm very reluctant to give anyone my debit card number. If it fell into the wrong hands, my checking account could be wiped out for who knows how long. With my credit card I can at least dispute any charges before I have to pay for any of them.

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Its my understanding that Visa / Mastercard will protect non pin based debit transactions (since they are really credit transactions). ACH is a different beast, from what it sounded like when reading the article, Balanced is somehow determining account numbers / routing numbers from bank accounts, which would be bad if they got hacked. On the other hand, they could just be issuing refunds to the cards.

We are not determining bank account numbers from debit card numbers.

You're issuing 'refunds' onto the cards without charging in the first place, right?

Unreferenced refunds are generally frowned upon by the card networks. We'll talk more about what exactly we're doing eventually, but I'm not ready to explain it all while we're still building.

I believe this is what Square Cash works http://www.quora.com/Square-Cash/How-does-Square-Cash-work-t...

Only sorta kinda.

In this context we are talking about a merchant selling a product through a marketplace platform, not a purchase. Signing up as a merchant with a just a debit card is potentially a lower barrier to entry, especially for one-off, occasional situations. The alternative isn't your credit-card, it is your bank routing and account number.

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