[skore]

Sorry for being a bit tangential, but I'm always astonished how people are still using checks for business. Especially in the US, where it seems standard industry practice of assholes to bounce checks.

(I read about France still being in love with checks as well, although they have basically your standing with banks depend on you handling checks well. So even if they're still using a horribly outdated method of payment, at least they attach the right consequences to fraud.)

[Silhouette]

Part of the problem with modern financial systems is that as a business, you almost never actually have the money you think you have, guaranteed, just because it's in your bank account. The number of ways that different kinds of transaction can be reversed -- in a compulsory way, by the other party, and possibly with them getting the benefit of the doubt in any dispute process -- is crazy. And that's just the technical measures, before you get into payment services that demand authority to instruct your bank as a business practice and obviously whatever legal remedies a court might order if you litigate a dispute.

I wonder how much more efficient the world would be if we had practical small claims systems in courts that were respected across borders, so there was an official and genuinely independent way to resolve disputes over small amounts of money, and then we did away with chargebacks, reversible transactions (other than in cases of genuine error), etc. While I'm dreaming, we could fix the crazy way that many of these payments are authorised, too. If bad people couldn't sneakily take your money so easily in the first place, you wouldn't need so many protections to get it back, which could then be abused against good people if the bad person is the customer.