this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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It's completely baffeling to me how an advanced country like the US can still be stuck with such an obsolete system.
Seriously - it's 2023, why are we still moving money around with paper IOUs
Same reason US politicians insist on having AM radio in cars, we mostly hate electronic voting, and a lot of people still like cold hard cash
I say this as a tech enthusiast myself: we vastly, collectively underestimate the fragility of high technology. Not just fragility of the operation, but fragility in the supply chain (silicon manufacturing is super specialized and centered in one of the world's most contested locations: Taiwan), fragility in the event of disaster, and fragility of the digital security.
I'm not sure that checks rate any better in security here, or in reliability. The check doesn't have any mechanism within it to verify that there's actually money to be moved, and doesn't guarantee that the payment is yours irrevocably. It also doesn't verify the actual intent to move money, or that the writer of the check is authorized to do so. I get that digital systems have vulnerabilities but let's not pretend that this paper system doesn't.
whose validty is verified by...checks notes...the payer's penmanship when writing their name in cursive