Cheques are cool! :)

They are the only way for a regular individual to emit their own bonds or better yet a promissory note.

Simply give your counterparty a post-dated cheque, if you have a good reputation you they'd give you the stuff immediately , and you have X days to find the money to put in your bank acount to satisfy their claim.

In countries where a bounced cheque means jail time such as Bahrain and Kuwait a post-dated cheque is essentially the same as money provided that the beneficiary informations have NOT been filled out (it's the bearer who fills the stuff out)

It's essentially a form of P2P lending which should not go away until we can do the same with bank wires (meaning setting up a bank wire transaction and give proof to our counterparty that we did so and that we cannot modify it).

EDIT: Now all the crypto-bros will come out of the woodwork with smart contracts....to which I reply: ok , do it, don't just talk about it

In the US, I still end up sending and receiving checks a few times per year. My theater troupe gets paid by check, for example. We could probably set up some kind of direct transfer between their organization and mine, but I don't know how. Zelle, maybe?

Checks have the advantage of no overhead. I don't have to pay transaction costs. That's not enormous, and the checks themselves require handling that costs my time, but it means that in a lot of cases it's just easier to do the thing that we already know how to do.

Before Covid (when he starting accepting payments through RentCafe.com) my landlord accepted only checks and money orders.

(Checks are better because a money order basically required a trip to the store for each one.)