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Comment by kenneth | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who refuses to use Venmo? When I need to pay friends casually, I use Facebook Messenger, Square Cash, or even PayPal (which is really easy in Slack with the `/paypal` command these days).

I have no interest in using an app that by default broadcasts my transactions to everyone, and that makes it a pain to get money out of its non-FDIC insured closed system. With Facebook or Square, the money gets pushed and pulled directly to my bank account, simply by adding a debit card.

Plus, when I did try to sign up once a long time ago… it had the audacity of asking for my SSN. I flat-out refused and refused to use Venmo ever since.

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Paypal is awful. It's not to be trusted under any circumstances. They often reverse your transactions and lock your account for any reason, or no reason.

A friend of mine offered a student some programming help. They used Paypal to pay. The student decided they didn't want to pay and told Paypal it was a fraudulent charge. Now my friend doesn't have the money and a strike against their account. (They contested that the charge was valid, but Paypal didn't care.)

BTC sadly is up to $3 in transaction fees, so it's not too lightweight at this point.

Bitcoin Cash is a fork of BTC with large blocks, which increases capacity and therefore reduces fees. They're about US$0.01 right now.

I recently had two < $.50 fee BTC transactions quickly verified. Segwit, among other things, is a block increase and enables the lightning network which will allow fast, cheap transfers.

Worth noting that the Lightning network is off-chain. Whether you care about that or not is up to you.

Use Litecoin or Ethereum instead. Both are more secure, more stable and faster.

Yeah litecoin doesn't get mentionned nearly enough but this sort of thing is it's raison d'être!

Btc has grown to fill the large tx space but there are trustworthy coins designed for smaller, cheaper interpersonal txs.

Don't use etherium for interpersonal because thet're not aiming for this use case long term. They want to be an underlying platform where ltc/doge were explicitely designed to settle small debts with friends or tip cam strippers. You don't have touse it on those strippers but if it's good enough for them, you should take a look.

Bitcoin Cash has support from the best mining farms money can buy, it will be hard to compete with the transaction price for the foreseeable future

PayPal is not very trustworthy, I agree. I use it as a last resort, and cash out any deposits of over $50 immediately. Facebook and Square are my preferred methods. But when I have to deal with people who have Venmo, but have never heard of Square and Facebook Messenger Payments… PayPal is usually a decent middle ground. It's pretty ubiquitous.

For what it's worth, PayPal owns Venmo and has so for quite a while.

Transactions are like 10 cents right now with SegWit I think

I don't really understand this comment. There's nothing stopping the student from doing the same thing with Vemno (especially since Venmo is owned by PayPal), and that sort of thing has happened many times before[1][2]. Venmo also has a strict "no business/commercial activities using personal accounts" policy.[3]

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/09/venm...

[2] http://gizmodo.com/reminder-venmo-wont-protect-you-from-scam...

[3] http://jolt.richmond.edu/2016/10/21/ignoring-the-venmo-user-...

The buyer in Venmo has pretty much no recourse whereas in PayPal it's pretty much the opposite… likely something to do with their early relationship with eBay.

So? The GP's complained his or her friend got scammed through PayPal as the "seller" (of services), not the "buyer." My point is Venmo would not have have protected the friend from this scam and, in fact, it would have been 10 times easier to pull off the scam because Venmo forbids this sort of buyer/seller commercial transaction with personal accounts. Nobody has any sort of "protection."

The big difference between the two services is PayPal is designed mainly for commercial activities and Venmo is designed for already established friends to more easily chip in for gas.

The friend was very naïve to accept a PayPal payment for a business transaction that wasn't covered by PayPal's Seller Protection while simultaneously expecting PayPal to protect against fraud. PayPal does cover sellers when there are unauthorized (or "unauthorized") charges but it doesn't apply to services, just physical goods (and excludes certain items like gift cards). It's like saying that the post office shouldn't be trusted to deliver greeting cards because a stranger sent you a fake check through the mail.

[I've successfully used PayPal's seller protection for an unauthorized charge and it was a real easy process.]

My comment didn't mention Venmo at all.

The point was to warn people not to use PayPal. It doesn't matter if it was naive when most people would expect PayPal to process a transaction.

You don't need to take my word for it. PayPal has a long and majestic history on HN consisting of hundreds of stories of how terrible PayPal is.

Why didn't your friend go to the student's university and tell them the student was paying people to do his assignments? I bet he would have changed his tune right quick.

Isn't that blackmailing?

I didn't say go to the student and blackmail him. I said go straight to the university.

> I have no interest in using an app that by default broadcasts my transactions to everyone.

This. 1 of my boxing trainers was using Venmo since 2016, and he even asked me to pay him through that at that time. So I came home and did some research, and in that process, found some payments that my other trainee friends had made to him, on his facebook wall.

I was like WTF?! Why would anyone broadcast their financial transactions, that too for something like Personal Training.

Moreover, the transactions I saw, for the exact same type of training I was receiving (pad work followed by sparring for 1 hour), was 20% to 40% less than what I was paying, and I felt like I was a sucker. I stopped training with him a few weeks later.

Never used Venmo either.

What? Venmo doesn't show you the payment amount for others' transactions.

I think it used to. It doesn't appear to now.

Correct. It did show amounts in 2016.

I use and prefer Venmo. I dislike PayPal. I have not used Square Cash. I would refuse to use FB Messenger if anyone asked (which no one has).

  I have no interest in using an app that by default 
  broadcasts my transactions to everyone

I haven't seen the default in some time, but it's very simple to change the privileges on a transaction (2 clicks, immediately visible on every transaction), which apply to all your future transactions unless you change it back. Cold comfort, but there you go.

  .. it had the audacity of asking for my SSN.

I'm frankly surprised that PayPal doesn't require a SSN for the same activities... or maybe they do. Venmo help[1] indicates they are required to do so for users with certain volumes (several hundred dollars per week) by the U.S. Treasury. Why would Paypal and other vendors not have the same requirements?

[1] https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/217532197-Social-Se...

Venmo is PayPal.

I've avoided giving PayPal my SSN by verifying a credit card and a bank account with trial deposits and linking them to my account. Otherwise you're limited to something like $300 in withdraws a month. I've had my PayPal account for 16 years though so it might be different now.

Square Cash is really quite the breath of fresh air after having gotten used to the crappy experience offered by Venmo/Paypal. I'm really just rehasing points made elsewhere in the thread, but there's no bullshit public sharing of your payment activities by default, and they allow you to automatically transfer balances directly into your bank account as you receive them. And the website and app are both super simple, reliable, and easy to use and easy on the eyes, unlike the Venmo clients which feels clunky and full of bugs.

I totally recommend giving it a try if you haven't already.

I probably will. I don't use Venmo very much, and when I do, it's to pay (or receive money from) people who also use Venmo. So it's convincing not just myself, but those with whom I transact, to use the same network.

Am I the only one who hates "Am I the only one" as the start of an argument? It's a disingenuous question, you are never the only one.

"I'm probably going to be downvoted for this, but..." (insert common opinion, receive upvotes)

Am I the only one who hates the frequent overuse/misuse of the word "disingenuous"?

>makes it a pain to get money out

A pain? It's by far the most painless of all the payment platforms I've used. I can request a withdrawal at 9am and have it in my account by 1pm. I've never seen that level of service on any other app.

Square Cash has instant withdrawal (and a much nicer design).

That doesn't make Venmo's experience painful. It's like 2 clicks to withdraw. I'm actually curious what OP finds difficult about it because I can't imagine it taking any less effort.

Worth noting that PayPal owns Venmo...

I refuse to use Venmo due to the creepy social aspect. I don't need to know that a friend of a friend just paid for their rent, and I certainly don't want my transactions being broadcast for all the world to see.

yeah that's the part i'm quite confused by. i've used venmo simply because my friend preferred to be paid that way, and then never after that but that social thing always baffled me because i can't imagine people being so willing to share their transactions with the world. i just assumed venmo being european may come from a different culture where perhaps people care less about privacy, but i never bothered to verify if that was the case.

Venmo isn't European, and at least from what I see not all that common here in comparison.

Just toggle the setting to make all transactions private. It's in the settings.

As a Swede I regularly feel we're missing out on a lot of cool stuff only available in North America, but when it comes to pain-free easy payments I think we've got it right with Swish (https://www.getswish.se/). It's free, ubiquitous, instant and all you need is the recipients phone number.

In Australia, the banks all built this into their mobile apps. Just transfer to others using phone number.

I've used it for Commbank -> Commbank payments, and it seemed to work well. How would it work for Commbank -> NAB, where the bank doesn't tie the number to an account?

AFAIK the first time you go from Commbank > Wespac (for example) the recipient receives an SMS instructing them to enter BSB/Acc number in Commbank's site. From then on, Commbank has paired the number to the bank account and it just goes direct from then on.

At least that's my observation. I do it from Commbank > other banks all the time and they don't have to do anything manually each time to receive the money - just a day or so later the money appears in their account.

> I have no interest in using an app that by default broadcasts my transactions to everyone

This is such an astounding deal breaker for me. I'm honestly more than a little surprised it's even legal. It just sounds like one of those things that wouldn't be because of course it's a bad idea and everyone agreed on that like 100 years ago or something.

It's configurable in the app's settings. You can change the default to private.

I share your distaste for Venmo, but I've often found it inconvenient to get everyone on Google Wallet or similar. You can actually set your privacy to never allow public posts when sending or receiving money.

Same boat here, I greatly prefer Square Cash (money goes directly between checking accounts so there is no second step to empty your balance), but the network effects of Venmo are too strong at this point. The all-transactions-private setting is easy to turn on.

> money goes directly between checking accounts

Some see this as a disadvantage of Square Cash--they say individual transactions clog their checking account statements, they prefer to withdraw a consolidated amount from their Venmo balance.

You're free to do that these days if you'd like with Square Cash… it lets you build a balance on their system just the way Venmo does. But it's not required and I personally disable that.

I don't like to have random balances on money-transfer startups' system, especially since it's uninsured.

> I have no interest in using an app that by default broadcasts my transactions to everyone, and that makes it a pain to get money out of its non-FDIC insured closed system.

You can change the default visibility in settings to only you and the person you're sending money too.

Also, your PayPal balance is not FDIC insured either.

I find Venmo a lot easier to use than PayPal and far more people I know are on there vs anything else. I do wish it auto deposited to a bank account like Square Cash though.

What's wrong with a simple wire transfer? Why go through all the trouble to let other entities transfer money when the bank can do so already?

Venmo is commonly used in social settings to reimburse small amounts (e.g. splitting the cost of food ordered for a party).

Wire transfers are generally cost prohibitive, and even assuming no fees, it’d be strange (and more time consuming) to ask a friend for their bank details to wire them $10 for pizza.

Wait, there's fees for transferring money from your bank account in the US?

With ACH transfers, generally not.

For my friends, the only reason they use Venmo is because the lender can send in the ticket. For any of the ones you mentioned, the sender has to be the one being responsible. People don't like reminding their peers to pay them back via personal communication

Square Cash lets you request money from people, if that's what you mean.

You can send an invoice on PayPal too, though it might seem a little odd to use that feature with your friends, it's very business-y.

When I owe my friends money I either have cash or I just get their bank details and put money into their account. I really don't need a third party to hold money in escrow to then move between people, banks already exist for that and it takes like 2 hours to show up in their account.

Sure an account number + sort code is slightly less easy to input than an email address but it's hardly difficult and after the first time my bank will remember it anyway.

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