[herbst]

I just recently bought a car for around 4000€ in cash. I even went to a ATM to withdraw money first.

Cash is, after all, the only instant and feeless transaction method. Why would I want to pay % fee or wait up to several days for a transaction like that?

Imagine I bought the car on Friday afternoon. The seller would get the money earliest on Monday. Why would the seller simply trust me? So how would I buy a car on a Friday afternoon otherwise?

[Aaargh20318]

> Cash is, after all, the only instant and feeless transaction method.

Bank transfers in the EU are instant, and there are no fees for personal accounts.

> Imagine I bought the car on Friday afternoon. The seller would get the money earliest on Monday.

No, the seller would get the money before they could even blink.

I have accounts at 2 unrelated banks. I have my online banking apps set up that whenever I get a deposit over a certain amount I get a push notification. When I use my online banking app to transfer money from my account at bank A to my account at bank B, I get an alert from bank B’s app to inform me of the money appearing in my account before the app from bank A has even shown me the confirmation screen that the transfer request was received.

This is true for any two banks in a SEPA country.

[herbst]

Well Switzerland has SEPA but realtime SEPA transactions are usually only available within the same bank. And I havent heard of any bank solving any Sepa transactions on the weekend here

[ffhhttt]

Technically not true. Not all banks support instant payments even if they use SEPA.

EU is planning to make their support mandatory but IIRC this only be the case during “business hours”.

[ffhhttt]

With SEPA you’d pay a fixed <1€ fee or it would be free. Also all at least semi-decent banks offer instant transactions.

> So how would I buy a car on a Friday afternoon otherwise?

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa...

[herbst]

Swiss banks are not decent enough