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Comment by julianlam | Hacker News Reader

A certified cheque, in order to buy a house or secure a large purchase.

Using a virtual bank, I would be able to request one, and have it mailed... the entire time it's being mailed, I would be on pins and needles, because that certified cheque is literally cash, and that cash is no longer in my account.

Should it get lost, you are SOL.

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I ramble on about this frequently on HN [1], but the Fed's FedNow instant payment service is going live next year. Initially, $25k will be the limit for value transfer, quickly moving to $100k, and finally supporting up to $500k under certain circumstances. Anything else and you're using FedWire (which tops out around $50M per wire transfer). This should eliminate the need for certified checks and money orders over time, and the fraud that goes with them (although fraud controls around instant payments will still be a risk to be mitigated and accepted in various quantities; the first release of FedNow will supposedly have fraud prevention tooling available to system participants).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31530010

It isn't literally cash, and you aren't sol. You can cancel a certified check, and only the recipient can cash it.

But that's just a terrible financial system, in Brazil you would just wire that money, possibly with a call to your manager to ensure the transaction is ok. But even if you want to use a literal antique like a cheque, you should be able to specify who will be able to cash it out and the money should not leave your account before that is done.

(last time I got a cheque was 2 decades ago as an already semi-dead payment method)

Every modern financial system that isn't designed for fraud has an undo mechanism in it. Some are harder to trigger than others, but nothing is lost.

What country are you referring to? Surely there are hardly any countries where use of a cheque/check is common for any purpose?

This level of financial insanity usually means the US

Use a wire transfer. It's faster than mailing a cheque and only costs like $20.

Twenty dollars for a transfer? I think my bank is expensive because I pay transfers 0.25 euro...

In my neck of the woods wires when buying property are so uncommon my lawyer told me I was the second one ever in her twenty-year practice to do so.

That's funny, I made 5 wires into escrow during my purchase

An old coworker of mine once sold some property to a guy who paid in cash. I would be terribly paranoid the entire day.

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