[al_borland]

What happens if someone had no debt, and thus no score? Lenders see this as a negative (to drive more business), but is likely a positive sign, as it means they live within their means and can get their bills paid without leaning on debt.

[chasebank]

I wasn't suggesting that people wouldn't be allowed to participate without a score, (which I think everyone has a score regardless of no debt?). I was suggesting that login / auth takes place by credit score verification. This would solve a couple problems. First, and most important, we know it's a real person commenting / participating. Second, systems could be designed to filter by score. For instance, if I'm researching products on reddit, I'd sure love to know A. it's a real person, and B. to filter by some score threshold. I'd wager people with higher scores have less incentive to get paid to shill some product online.

Anyways, from the little research I've done, it's certainly illegal and not a proper mechanism for authentication. One can dream though :)

[behindsight]

While it's commendable, the reality is they should have already "figured out" how to play the system and just farmed the reward points from credit cards and immediately pay them off without incurring any interest.

You get a good credit score and still live within your means while also getting additional points + bank covering any fraudulent activity if the card got stolen.

Of course this method probably won't work for people that feel they would rather just cut themselves off from temptation fully or those without access to banking systems, which I sympathise with.

[al_borland]

> the reality is they should have already "figured out" how to play the system and just farmed the reward points from credit cards and immediately pay them off without incurring any interest.

I did this for a while after being bitten a couple times for not having a credit history.

However, I recently stopped. I still keep one card around and active just to maintain my score… just in case. However, spending $10k for $200 in rewards… I don’t really care. That’s mostly a tool to get people to justify more spending.

I’ve quite liked using the debit card and seeing the number go down when I spend, it makes more sense intuitively, and I always know exactly what I have. I had a debit card stolen about 20 years ago; I was able to get the charges reversed, no different from a credit card in my experience. It’s on the Visa network.

I would cancel my last credit card, but I don’t want to deal with cell phone deposits and other nonsense, like I had to in the past.