I’m gonna be that guy: cryptocurrency fixes this.
"But Zelle’s terms are clear: You can’t cancel a payment once it’s been sent if the recipient is already enrolled with Zelle. And if you send money to someone you don’t know for a product or service, you may not get your money back for a product or service that’s not delivered."
https://www.elliott.org/problem-solved/how-to-get-your-money...
The difference with crypto is that you're not going to be filing a Regulation E dispute against someone on the other side of the planet.
"Since Regulation E is virtually unknown outside of the financial services industry, few people — let alone customers — know the process of filing a claim."
Oh come on. Zelle and the banks are literally banking on the fact that they are protected by exactly these sorts of unknown processes. Are you really advocating for more of that?
> The difference with crypto
The difference with crypto is that contracts, written in code, can be used to do escrow that don't require a third party centralized company like Zelle to handle the transfers. They also work across borders. No need to tie up the US legal system with 'Regulation E' cases over $1700 rent payments or having to hire lawyers to sue banks.
My point is that, we can work to make this stuff better, or we can keep the status quo of having to learn about 'regulation e'. I'm on the side of working to make this better.
People say that crypto is just re-inventing what already exists and a lot of it is doing that... I'm ok with that. What exists is not always the best solution.
In the case of escrow contracts. The funds are in a contract. Those funds will be released to a specific wallet only when two humans agree to their human consensus. The blockchain again, is the settlement layer.
When I bought my house, it went through an escrow process. I had to pay some human paper pusher thousands of dollars to do something that really could have just been done by computers for fractions of a cent and in a matter of minutes.
Escrow is one area that you're going to have a hard time arguing with me that isn't a perfect use case for blockchain. I don't care if it is 'overly complicated'... nothing is more overly complicated than the current process today.
I wish those were called something else. They aren't actually contracts in the sense most people understand the term. And, being code (and immutable, if I understand it), I don't find their existence reassuring from a safety point of view. But that's neither here nor there.
> No need to tie up the US legal system
As (highly) imperfect as it is, the legal system does, at least, provide mechanisms to correct injustices.
I did use Zelle for that, required two payments since the limit was $2k/day. Also super lame... why can't I be trusted with my own money? "For your protection."
I'd love to know your magical way of paying him $4000.
I got scammed 500 USD using Wise, so it's not like these services help you in any way.
That said, with things like Wise (which I'd never heard of until your comment), it pays to read the fine print and avoid the ones that don't offer any real protection for you.
Not your keys, not your coins.
"Don't use paypal, cash solves this!"
Both systems have the same problem, in that people need to use intermediaries to accomplish the transactions they want to accomplish. Crypto solves nothing, it converts problems into different problems.