[yc1010]

It would be similar to a cheque, central banks and governments do not like normal people printing "money" or inventing their own

a better alternative would be bitcoin paperwallets, this here relies on Venmo to play nice as well as the "payer"

[cydrobolt]

Agreed. Using Bitcoin would definitely help make it resemble cash, however, this could potentially be less convenient. Venmo is more popular among students, especially on university campuses, so the idea was to make it easy to adopt among friend groups, not specifically to guarantee the transfer of funds.