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Comment by iammrpayments | Hacker News Reader

Thought they use Sepa

I wish. The small inconvenience of putting in an IBAN and a matching name instead of just an email address is already enough for many people to default to paypal. Just happened to me again yesterday, the guy preferred to bring cash next time we see each other instead of just receiving my info via text.

"The guy" probably let you know in a polite way that you were behaving immaturely. You're not supposed to ask your friends for money to split bills etc. The way grown ups do it is "I pay this time, you pay next time".

No, he didn't. He offered to cover a case of beer for after our game at the park, but he didn't have a car, so he asked me to bring it and he'll pay for it. Afterwards he came to me (I never brought up the topic of money) and asked for my Paypal details. How am I in the wrong here?

The whole "I pay this time you pay next time" is already covered by "everybody brings a case once in a while", but if the guys without cars just ask someone else to pay for it when it's their turn it won't add up.

If you're going to make assumptions, perhaps start with those that don't paint me in a bad light.

You weren't in the wrong, he was. He shouldn't have asked somebody to pay for something and bring it if he didn't have the money at hand to cover for it. PayPal isn't real money in this case.

If this was a long time friend, I'd let it slide. It's just a case of beer, and in Germany beer is dirt cheap. If this was a new acquaintance, I'd let it slide and take note that it's not a person to make friends with.

> If you're going to make assumptions, perhaps start with those that don't paint me in a bad light.

Good point. But all of this isn't a problem of payment systems, but of people's behaviour.

This seems likely to be cultural, possibly even microcultural.

I know many adults who believe that splitting bills is a normal and reasonable thing to do.

Splitting bills, where each pay a part in the restaurant, fine. Splitting bills where one pays and the other sends him money, not.

Who is making these rules up? Why do you think they apply universally?

God made them, as far as I know. Humanity lived in gift economies long before the invention of barter and trade.

These are etiquette rules, which have their benefits. Since nobody is forced to follow etiquette, they help you to learn things about people.

Generosity is one of the easiest life hacks to find out who is friendly towards you and who is not. If you buy them a drink and they won't buy you a drink back, that's a tiny cost for you to know what kind of fellow you're dealing with. If they buy you a drink and then asks you to transfer money to them, you also learn something about them. If people splitting bills want to sit and count to make sure that everybody pays exactly for what they had, then you learn something. And so on.

If you invite people for dinner a few times, you will learn something about that person whether you wanted to or not.

The presence of social constructs is advantageous to group survival, and an individual operating within a given set of such constructs may choose to adhere to or reject the norms of those constructs. As you say, you do learn things about people through interacting with them. I think ideally this interaction includes discovering what their norms are, whether they believe they are conforming/rejecting/otherwise to a status quo, and the reason for it. The action itself is may not be sufficient to infer an individual's values without the context and reasoning, especially in the absence of clear communication. Social constructs are local to social groups and subgroups, with differing levels of conservation and generalization between groups.

This is not how German culture works.

SEPA uses your IBAN (account number), and one can also enter this account number for payment, implicitly allowing the store to withdraw money from it...

You must be referring to SEPA Direct Debit, which would be very risky to use to siphon funds. There's an 8 week no-questions-asked refund policy, 13 months for unauthorized transactions, if the payment fails (eg due to insufficient balance), the payee is charged a non-refundable cancelation fee. [0] And that's all separate from any legal troubles for fraudulent charges. I don't know why Germans use PayPal over SEPA, but I'd be surprised if SEPA Direct Debit was the reason.

[0] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-direc...

IBANs aren't secret, they have the same level of confidentiality as your address or birth date.

One-off SEPA Direct Debit is virtually unheard of, recurring payments are a bit more common but usually involve a €0,01 payment to prove ownership of the account. The transactions are also trivial to undo, and can only be initiated by companies.

So no, "IBAN fraud" isn't a thing in practice. You can safely share your IBAN with your friends for instant free wire transfers.

Well yes. But just in case this wasn't clear: this is a crime, and you will get your money back in most cases. It's on the merchant to ensure a Direct Debit Mandate is actually valid.

I do not think it is possible to withdraw money having only an IBAN. It would need a SEPA direct debit mandate for my bank to accept the transfer request.

That sounds like the same info on a check, which people hand out freely. I'm probably misunderstanding.

Sepa is how my kid's daycare debits me each month, or how I transfer money to other accounts (most bills are direct-debit, but sometimes I get a one-off invoice and I have to transfer the money myself).

But for the small person-to-person type thing, paypal is the defacto here (sadly).

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