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Comment by wdutch | Hacker News Reader

> spend the 5 mins dallying on venmo trying to look up their handle, with terrible cell service, and hope you don't misclick on a total stranger who won't return your money if its missent.

I think all your other points are valid but this one is odd to me; it just seems like bad Venmo UI. I've never used Venmo and I live in East Asia where most systems use QR codes to identify the vendor. The chances of sending money to the wrong account is slim to nil and it takes less than a minute. I'm currently sat in a cafe where I can see 5 QR codes lined up on the counter for different apps.

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Venmo also has QR codes. I have never entered someone's handle manually when in the situation described above. The person opens up their code, you scan it. Takes like 5 seconds.

Except when someone manages to paste over their own QR over the vendor's sneakily.

Venmo also allows using QR codes quite easily (tap "Scan" on the home screen and then scan a code or tap "Venmo me" to show your code), but for some reason many users don't seem to know that and end up trying to look people up by their username instead. I think it's because QR codes really never caught on in the US.

QR codes are clumsy and inconvenient, moving to NFC was the right move for the states and most of the developed world. However, Starbucks uses QR codes for its app if you pay in store (but you can mobile order and not pay in store at all, so I rarely bother).

China built its cashless system using QR codes, since it doesn't require any additional hardware beyond a smartphone and the clumsiness is just another thing you get used to over there.

I could be misremembering since I lived in China a long time ago, but I feel like QR codes were wildly popular in Asia long before digital payments became really popular. So it probably made sense on several fronts to adopt them for payments as well (everyone already used them anyway, they're effectively free, etc.) rather than build a new system.

I didn't think they were especially popular until they were used for mobile payments. I'm not really sure about other countries in east Asia, they tend to grow completely different ecosystems from China.

> QR codes are clumsy and inconvenient

May be, but at least all smartphones have a camera. Same can't be said about NFC.

Yes, that’s why the Chinese chose the technology. Whereas America was already used to POS’s everywhere, and square makes relatively affordable receiver NFC POS hardware for phones.

They absolutely did in my US city during the pandemic—every restaurant at least temporarily only provided menus via QR codes at the front.

Venmo UI used to be a lot more serviceable, but they recently updated the app to add crypto speculation to it, and I have no idea where things are in the redesigned layout. Even then, the requirements are that I need cell service at least, and data service even where I live in a county of 10 million people can be quite spotty. Not to mention I still don't have an unlimited plan and am sometimes throttled before my billing cycle resets.

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