Send Money to Friends in Messenger | Hacker News Reader

Send Money to Friends in Messenger

newsroom.fb.com

282 pointsiceron280 comments

"Hey RELATIVE it's me here on Facebook I had to get a new account because I'm in trouble here in FOREIGN COUNTRY so please send me money. It's really easy and I need it bad! Just enter your credit card and I will be saved!"

I know, I know, it's not the tool...but I am reminded of a certain scene from The Fifth Element...

"I hate warriors, too narrow-minded. I'll tell you what I do like though: a killer, a dyed-in-the-wool killer. Cold blooded, clean, methodical and thorough. Now a real killer, when he picked up the ZF-1, would've immediately asked about the little red button on the bottom of the gun. "

Kindel's Law: "Every new payment system rapidly transforms into an anti-fraud system."

Even lower-level, anything consumable by, well, anyone, quickly transforms from add-to-cart, checkout, and ship (whether digitally or physically), to add-to-cart, checkout, make sure they're actually the cardholder and legitimately authorizing the purchase, ship.

I have seen far too many places -- whether they're side projects, smb, or even enterprises -- completely miss the antifraud step. There are companies like MaxMind who <help identify and somewhat prevent this> but for someone who is above average-intelligence and an apt "carder", it's so trivial to get around.

When I'm tasked by x company -- a bank, company, security team, or someone with a side project -- to run through their site and try to get an order shipped using false credentials, I can't even speak to how easy it is for me to do so with trivial effort. And it's not all fun to see.

There is a company who does gift cards, and they'd ship them out instantly. Once redeemed by the other merchant, bam, they're SOL.

Don't be this company. Don't be this entrepreneur. Don't be this hacker. Reach out to someone who knows what they're doing. If your business relies on conducting transactions, I don't care if it's flowers or dog leashes, or some shit that's going to end up on Shark Tank, you need to have anti-fraud in place.

Sorry for my ignorance but what are possible anti-fraud rules for, say, a flower merchant?

Depending on how often the merchant is bitten by fraud, they can require to see an ID card for certain types of transaction (such as cash or check), or raise prices to cover the fraud costs.

Generally, they try to ensure that the liability shift is on the bank's side, by using an EMV capable system for most payments. Of course, that usually requires them to have a specific contract; banks, on their side, perform a risk assessment to ensure that they won't be covering too much fraud.

It's difficult but it comes down to loss-prevention.

I could setup a site with a front-facing flower shop, accept orders, take in the peoples $$ legitimately, and then transact and fulfill their orders (via fraud) on 1800flowers.com for example.

I realize that anyone could do this for anything, but the weaker your weak points are, the easier it is to capitalize on them.

Or the opposite, and started as an anti-fraud system (see PayPal)

PayPal didn't start as an anti-fraud system? It was a payment system that developed a pretty novel anti-fraud system and which was the foundation for a different company that does a ton of anti-fraud.

It most certainly did.

"Confinity Inc. is best known as the creator of PayPal. It was founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek, initially as a Palm Pilot payments and _cryptography_ company. Confinity launched its milestone product, PayPal in late 1999."

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity

In the book "Founders at work", there is a chapter about Paypal's founder and half his interview is about how banks told them they'd be crushed by fraud, then how fraud was probably eating up 10-30% of their transfers, then how they built such an incredible alrogithm against fraud that they had to build a room around the server to protect their trade secret.

Actually the key differentiator of PayPal, at least according to Thiel, is it wasn't an algorithm. It was a method to abstract the transactions enough to allow a fraud analyst (not a computer, or even a computer/data scientist), to interpret the patterns.

It had some cute name that I can't recall right now. Hugo or something? It was spun out into a separate company to use the same philosophy to fight terrorism. That company is Palantir and seems to be Thiel's opus magnum.

Oh wow. That's crazy how it seems never to be mentioned in the history of the "PayPal Mafia," or at least not the ones that I've read. Cool info, thanks.

except bitcoin

All right, I used the same address as last time.

-bitcoiner's fantasy.

Well in this case it looks like you need to be friends, so any spam requests from non-friends would likely go into the never seen abyss that is the 'other' folder.

That being said, if you haven't ever checked your 'other' folder you probably should. Last time I saw this mentioned people had missed wedding invitations, potential dates and more from people they weren't facebook friends with trying to reach them.

You get to it by clicking the message icon in the blue bar at the top and then clicking the small text 'other' in the top left of that pop up.

A hotel found my kindle and sent me a message. I didn't see it for two years.

Hrm, well I barely acknowledge that I have an account so I wouldn't really say I've been missing them, Bob.

It may be limited to the platform apps... didn't see anything like this in the web interfaces. That said, it's always a pain... ironically the least painful (if both parties have a chase account) is chase's quickpay...

You have a explicit friend graph in this case. It's a great for you (and more importantly Facebook) to assess creditworthiness.

At this point, I just want one of these pay-with-your-phone solutions to win and be ubiquitous.

The current situation is almost comical. "Do you have Venmo? Haven't set that up yet, can you send over Paypal?. No, what about Square Wallet? Nope, what about Gmail?"

At least for my demographic in NYC it feels like Venmo has enough traction that there isn't much friction if you ask to be paid/pay with Venmo. Enough people have it that the odd one out who doesn't feels compelled to sign up, and the onboarding is also fast enough that people can sign up while waiting for the check at a restaurant, for example.

I used Venmo for a while and it works well. Square Cash I've found is even better since it skips the unnecessary social part, doesn't hold funds (directly transfers to bank) and somehow people can sign up without having to do the mini deposit account verify dance with their bank.

I'm not sure how this is possible since doesn't that mean that anyone can just input a debit card and start withdrawing money? It is nice though because people can sign up instantly instead of it taking a couple days.

It comes out of your bank account, that sounds awful. In that they don't have the security requirements of banks, or the fraud protection of credit cards. So Venmo gets hacked, and everyone's (non-refundable) money gets transferred to Russia. Great.

I've never understood how the hell Square does it. It's an awesome experience though.

They (ab?)use the transaction that occurs when money is refunded to a debit card.

http://jonbwhite.tumblr.com/post/66853226398/how-square-move...

Well I knew that they used the refund rails, but I was curious how they protect against fraud. This seems to imply that there's nothing magical regarding the anti-fraud: they just try stay on top of it.

I was wondering how they did it - that's really cool. Thanks for the link.

All that says is that Venmo has traction among your immediate peers. If Paypal/Square wallet/Bitcoin had the same traction, the rest of your comment would still be hold.

In fact this is just the second time I've heard about Venmo and I don't care remotely. My peer group is heavily PayPal based and therein lies the issue - fragmentation suddenly becomes painfully obvious when you try to pay someone you've not sent money to before or you go to a new store which has decided to use the new hotness which you've never even heard of.

Sure, but that was really my point: I was just offering a tiny data point on the progress towards the goal that the person I was replying to expressed:

> At this point, I just want one of these pay-with-your-phone solutions to win and be ubiquitous.

I'm not saying this is a clear winner, just that Venmo is well on its way to ubiquity in this market, at least within my demographic/peer group. I'm fairly social, and I try to keep an eye on the tech that people I meet who don't work in tech are using, and Venmo certainly stands out in that regard.

I live in Australia and have literally never heard of this service until right now. I think you are drastically overestimating its penetration.

I didn't intend to make any claims about global market penetration. Just pointing out that it has notable tractiom in my market and peer group, and that because of that it had made strides towards the ideal bill-splitting situation outlined above: it is used widely enough that it's a clear default when splitting a bill with a mixed group. Maybe it won't catch on any more widely, but similar apps have been around for a while and never reached the adoption where multiple people in a group would suggest or accept them as payment. It's not actually available outside the US right now, which may be why you haven't heard of it, and which is clearly a big hurdle on the road towards true ubiquity.

I blame Lucas.

Seriously though, I don't like Venmo's "cash out" approach, but maybe that's because I don't use it enough to want to carry a Venmo balance.

It's bizzare that our financial sector is the largest area of the economy and yet has not managed to produce any innovation in this regard. Shouldn't banks be giving us easy ways to transfer money? Isn't this their function? Financial services?

Here in Canada, I can do an email money transfer to virtually any financial institution. All the recipient needs to do is bank with one that supports it and use online banking.

I don't know how innovative it is, but it works relatively well.

https://www.interac.ca/en/interac-etransfer/etransfer-detail

Yes, Canada is ahead. On the other hand that email money transfer incurs a transaction fee from most banks.

What pisses me off is that we have a nearly ubiquitous way to send money in the physical world--a cheque. Yet, in the digital world we stumble to achieve the same.

I blame the profit driven corporations as each solution incurs a transaction fee and/or a proprietary solution with no interop with other systems.

My experience doing B2B money transfers: For those out of country I paid a $25-50 fee to do a wire transfer. Meanwhile bank transfers within Canada required a cash withdrawal (or bank draft), followed by a trip to the other bank to perform the deposit. Sigh.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the transaction fee either.

My bank allows me to set up personal payees, though I have to go into a branch to do it. It acts just like a bill payment, which I get for free. The downside is that it takes a day (if the recipient is at the same bank) or more (if they're not at the same bank).

The plus side on the email transfer is that it is virtually instant (~5 minutes usually).

I'll be staying in BC for a while this year. It's the first time I've seriously looked at Bitcoin to transfer money from Australia. The problem I have is the fees are from both sides - the Australian bank and the Canadian one.

Has anyone tried TransferWise?

I've used OzForex for $20k. Deeply satisfied.

I (bank at B of A) just did this with my wife (Wells-Fargo). No transaction fees that I see.

Yet it's still slower and more expensive than sending a friend a photo of a physical filled-out cheque. Ridiculous.

edit: s/screenshot/photo/

I've found that email transfers take about 5 minutes, it's not terribly slow at all. The expense bothers me though.

I would feel a lot better about using email transfers if my bank had better security than my bloody smartphone, but as it stands my pin can't be any more complex than the pin to my smartphone. Canadian banking security is embarrassing, though I understand its not much better elsewhere.

Why? That isn't their function. They aren't making money off your checking account.

Do you think these companies have contracts with all the banks, everywhere in the world?

The back-end is made from ACH/SWIFT which are indeed from traditional financial services. Access to these key services is restricted for liability reasons, although you can indeed make a wiretransfer from most bank accounts online. I can do 4 of these a month without any charges.

In much of Europe, there's more or less no limit. In some countries like Belgium, direct bank transfer is so common[0] your IBAN is printed on your credit card. Others are significantly less enlightened in that regard.

[0] as in, it's a perfectly normal way to reimburse friends or colleagues who've paid stuff for you

Yep, we don't even think about this in Australia. All the banks have web/mobile apps with solid transfer tools. Same bank transfers are instant and to other banks are 1-2 business days.

In Canada there are dirt simple ways to transfer money. Every bank has an app. Every card has a chip. And so on.

Chase actually has a great solution, Chase QuickPay. Here in Chicago it is very popular. https://www.chase.com/online-banking/quickpay

It's not limited to Chase. It's called clearXchange and was started by the 3 big banks (Chase, BoA, Wells Fargo) and is now extending to more: https://www.clearxchange.com/payments/member-banks

clearXchange allows account holders in any of the member banks to send funds to each other and it takes about 1-2 days after the first transaction. It also allows sending funds via cellphone. If you have a Wells Fargo account, you can send funds to a BoA account holder using just their phone number.

I think the banks have done a horrible job of advertising this free no-strings-attached service.

Canada has a similar solution, but it works across all of the big banks. Chase's solution is only for Chase customers, though it appears that the recipient doesn't necessarily need to be a Chase customer.

https://www.interac.ca/en/interac-etransfer/etransfer-detail

Innovation and long-term market share are probably inversely correlated.

In the UK we have PayM which is set up by the banks.

You simply load your bank's mobile app and send money to your mate using his phone number. It's pretty simple to set up and works across most major banks here.

You have no idea how jealous I am of that and your whole SWIFT code system.... ACH is the worst and most things (this included) have to use gross "refund" hacks to send money to a user's debit card because ACH is so slow, unrecoverable, and a large number of people just give you a blank stare if you ask for their Routing + Account numbers.

The Swedish equivalent is called Swish. The transfer is instant and all you need to know is the recipients phone number. Sender and recipient doesn't need to have the same bank.

Swish got some bad press when Moxie noticed that they "borrowed" some code, but the system is easy to use and seems to work well.

[1] http://blog.nullbyte.eu/open-curtains-in-swish-payments-serv...

That would be awesome to have here in the US.

I wonder what incentives these new players have to provide a medium to transfer money on their platform? Why should I give my credit card to Facebook or Snapchat?

It doesn't really make sense for me. I would much rather use a vendor that's sole purpose is to provide a means of money transferring. I don't need the convenience of typing a sigil followed by the amount to send money to friends. If I really can't electronically send them money, I will go out of my way to give them cash at a later date.

Do one thing. Do it well. vs Do everything. Do it OK.

Companies have always started in the former, and expanded to the latter to not only diversify their "investments" (using that very loosely), but increase revenue.

It just makes sense. And from a tech company it makes sense in a world where internet banking is still only adopted by ~60% of consumers. (I know, surprised me too.)

The cognitive load is expensive. I had never heard of venmo until this thread although I've heard of the 20 or so competitors.

A confuseopoly depends on an uninformed public. I'm sure there's some special reason for each of the 20 or so payment services, although I don't have the time and motivation to research. Confuseopolies are designed to screw the end user. So I'm inherently scared away from "payment services". Especially when simple cash is to fast, easy, incredibly cheap, and convenient.

Where we're at right now with payment services is roughly 80s BBS or 90s walled garden legacy services. "Wow, if the whole world were on this BBS or on compuserv then the whole world could talk together... but no there's fifty BBSes in my LATA alone"

Simple dominates all of these, in my opinion. It is perfect from a user experience side. (If people already have the service, but people really want the service for more than the mobile payments part)

Simple lover here, I agree, I love being able to Simple Instant money to friends but I agree with the reply to your comment about how it's a bank and not a payment service. While I will stay will Simple for the foreseeable future (AMAZING customer support, beautiful app and website, goals, and instant transfer) I am somewhat disappointed in Simple as a company. They came out saying they were going to be a full bank and have an API and all of that and then backtracked on a lot of it. They are just a layer over an existing bank (which limits them somewhat) and there is still no API to be seen.

Also it feels like improvements have been VERY slow coming. Goals finally got some much needed attention but it's still lacking. I have to do everything manually when my paycheck comes in because their goals come out daily. I don't get paid daily, why would I want that money coming out daily? I just want to set aside money for car/rent/insurance/etc when I get paid, maybe things like "wants" (a new TV, computer, etc) work better for the daily pull but even then I'd rather just set aside $XXX when I get paid through goals.

Simple is an entire bank/debit card. Square Cash, Venmo, etc can all be set up on your existing debit card. I certainly hope I don't have to switch banks to do mobile payments.

All of the other mobile payments things seem like they want to be your bank (but only sorta kinda sorta).

Simple is just that. A bank (or rather, a banking services provider. Us bancorp is the actual bank).

The tight integration with mobile payments, because of them also being a banking services provider, is absolutely flawless.

I use Simple, and Square cash, and I have to say that Square Cash is far superior for sending money to friends.

Simple has several significant limitations, namely, the need to mail checks over a certain threshold (I think $5k) and I don't know whether they do credit origination, either.

End of the day, I went with good-old-brick'n'mortar Wells Fargo because (1) I wanted to establish a long-term customer relationship with a bank that can provide me with various credit products (including for business) (2) their ATM network is ubiquitous where I live (SF) and (3) there are many branches with convenient hours for when I want to do something a little off the beaten path.

I don't give a rat's about how quickly a $10 payment is available. I care a lot more about good fraud controls, and the ability to speak to a human being, in person, when things occasionally go wrong.

But it involves people signing up for a new bank. The barrier to entry for Simple is huge.

At least Gmail & Facebook are pretty widely used already though

But with both Google and Facebook essentially being advertising companies a notable amount of people are hesitant to give them access to personal data. That could be a real hindrance to them becoming ubiquitous payment providers.

> a notable amount of people are hesitant to give them access to personal data.

I bet this number is much lower than you think it is. People outside of the tech/hacker scene don't care about privacy (in this context). "Who cares if Facebook knows that I went to McDonalds?"

I tend to agree with that, regardless. My general take is that i want life empowering features driven by data. Of course, i would prefer to not give X company my data, but until a home-brew solution comes to light it's unrealistic for me to expect privacy and these types of features. In the end, i want the features. I want Google Now (well, i want what it represents.. it still sort of sucks haha).

Honestly, if said data is used to generate some demographic profile in order to show me less irrelevant ads while still paying for these incredibly useful services, I don't terribly mind. Advertising has been around for a while but being able to guess what might apply means less reliance on sheer volume in order to get the same value from the "ad space". I completely understand the ways this can backfire (shadowy three-letter agencies stealing that profile info, leaks that reveal info that someone figures out how to tie to your identity, etc) but those things are already distinct possibilities with credit card companies, email providers, loyalty cards, medical records, and a host of other things. Leveraging information to create valuable services that would otherwise not be possible is probably not going away anytime soon. At least this way it's easy to split bar tabs or cab rides.

Not their respective payment services, though. Receiving one of these Facebook payments won't work unless you've added a credit card to your Facebook.

"You owe me $20" "OK, hold on, here's an ATM." ... "Here you go."

"The total for both of us was $55, so you owe me $27.5."

"OK, here is some random bank's ATM which charged me $44 to get $40 (2 x $20) out, and now you say you don't have $12.5 in change on you ... well, shit." ... "What will you prefer: GWallet or FB ?"

"OK you say you owe me a beer from last week so here's a $20 and we're even"

"Oh you need the full $27.50 because your life will collapse due to a lack of $7.50 in cash although nobody uses cash, well, there's an ATM in the lobby thats free on my network, I'll spot you $30 on the $27.50 and you owe me a can of soda next time"

The problem with a bazzilion services all trying to extort small transactional fees either short term or long term is the marketing about their fee can't avoid mentioning that the fee is really small and we're discussing fairly small amounts of money.

There is absolutely no fee on Venmo/Square Cash/PayPal as long as you use debit card/bank account.

I am okay with rounding off amounts with my close friends. But with other people there is that social angle with being comfortable enough when I tell them I will buy you soda next time. Plus consider this "buying soda next time" with 10 people at the same time in either direction. The question is not about $2.50 being a small amount. I like being exact about money and so do lot of my friends. May be I am from a different background where $2.50 is still money that should be cleared.

Which horrendous country are you living in where ATMs charge $44 for a withdrawal?

He got 40€ out and paid 4€ in fees. Thats not uncommon in Germany, where different bank groups (eg Deutsche Bank, the Raiffeisen cooperative association and the Sparkasse) charge nothing for withdrawals but other bank customers get charged. Couple of years ago it was introduced that the fees had to be displayed prior to withdrawal but they're still high.

"$44 to get $40" => $4 in fees for using another bank's ATM. This is very much within the ballpark range for USA at least.

Sidenote: Usually such fees are O(1), i.e., independent of the actual amount being withdrawn (and even applies to non-monetary transactions, such as balance inquiry).

$4 in fees

"You owe me $20" "Ok, hold on, let me get into my car, drive down the street, look for parking, get out of my car, wait in line, pay an extra $1-4, drive back down the street, look for parking, exit car, then hand you your $20 that just cost me about $30 in time, effort and gas."

But maybe I'm cynical because I'm in Austin and driving anywhere is just miserable.

Why are there no blue mailboxes anywhere?

When you get used to something like Venmo, and a critical mass of friends are using it, it's amazing how effortless it is. Take a cab somewhere, one person pays with their credit card, the other people settle up in the next 30 seconds. Done.

It's the critical mass of friend's that key though. Hell, Paypal is just as effortless once that critical mass is hit, and that's has been around since 1998.

Paypal's UX has changed to be simpler, but I don't think they even had a mobile app for the longest time. It was also several inputs, such as choosing the type of transaction to make sure you don't get charged a fee for sending money to your friend.

I'm not going to go home and remember to paypal on my desktop when I could just use the venmo app to send you money right after you paid.

Plus PayPal has the friction of forcing you to log in. Which many of these other sites skip.

Square Cash has pretty much no friction, even without other people actively using it, because recipients don't need to create an account.

"Oh wait, that's not my bank's ATM. I don't want to be charged a $4 fee. Oh well, I'll get you next time." ATM's are not a good solution. I don't want to pay $24 to give someone $20 because of ATM fees. Or wait in a long line (assuming you are at a busy location/area) to get the money.

Or - here's this "checkbook" thing I have sitting in my bag, I'll write you a $20 check, and you open up your banking app and deposit it immediately, and keep the paper check just for a receipt.

People walk around with checks? I cringe on the rare occasions I have to write one to the local water utility (they refuse to provide any recurring payment solution - I suspect because low margins, and they like the late payment fees).

Wait, there's a fee to withdraw money from ATMs? Never heard of such a thing.

It is pretty much the default in the United States, but Wikipedia seems to say it exists around the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATM_usage_fees

It depends on a lot of things. Some banks charge to withdraw from other banks' accounts. Some banks join "networks" and don't charge for others in the same network. Some ATMs are set up inside stores, and they charge money that goes to the store instead of a bank.

I hear it's pretty common in the US. I guess it has to do with the question who operates the ATM. In Germany it exists too if you use an ATM from a bank that's not partnering with your bank (which is ~50% of all ATMs and straightforward to figure out).

Why is anyone still paying ATM fees??? Change to a bank that refunds the fee.

Ah, yes, instead of using Square Cash, I'll just have all my friends change banks! ;)

There are banks that refund ATM fees.

It's inevitable:

http://xkcd.com/927/

Don't forget about Bitcoin.

Almost no one outside of my techie friends know about Bitcoin. Even fewer understand how it works, so that's a no go.

Not knowing the technical, or legal arrangements of SWIFT doesn't prevent one from making a traditional international wire-transfer.

My 70 year old dad can use bitcoin. I'm sure your friends can learn.

Your 70 year old dad is an exception in a sea of people that don't want to learn.

One comedian put it this way: You can't fix stupid.

Point being: Learning is a lifelong pursuit, and if you don't want to learn then you will be left behind using Facebook Messenger to send money. Kidding, but you hopefully get the gist.

But at what expense? The existing system is not that broken for majority of the world so why should they care about learning this?

That will change. Cryptocurrencies are here to stay. There is no undoing decentralized commerce. It will change the world in ways we can hardly fathom.

If your debts are in dollars, I don't see any point in Bitcoin with its fluctuating exchange rate.

The points are that you don't need 1. a bank account 2. a debit/credit card 3. facebook messenger in order to send money instantly.

You just need a bitcoin balance and the recipient needs a bitcoin address. Which practically seems like way more friction than the three items you listed.

Bitcoin has its problems, but getting a bitcoin address is much less friction than setting up a bank account.

That's like encountering email in 1994 and dismissing it as a piece of crap because none of your friends have computers or internet access.

A better analogy is that it's like dismissing the alternatives to email that popped up in the later 90s and dismissing them because even though they were obviously better than email (but not as much so as email over snail mail), no one you knew used them.

Not to mention the fact that the recipient needs a bank account anyway if they want to convert their bitcoin into something that they can actually spend outside of the dark web. Worse, the recipient also needs a bitcoin exchange account to even make the conversion possible, then they have to wait two days for the exchange to ACH the money into their bank. This all assumes the exchange will even do business with them following their extensive KYC checks.

I've never had a bank require that I OAuth with Facebook or give them copies of my passport in order to get an account. Bitcoin is just not the solution to this problem.

> needs a bank account anyway if they want to convert their bitcoin into something that they can actually spend outside of the dark web

That's not true. Americans (Facebook's intended audience for this Messenger money-sending feature) can spend bitcoins directly at Microsoft, Dell, Expedia, Overstock, Newegg, Tiger Direct, DISH Network, etc. They can use and spend bitcoins theoretically received from FB friends without having a credit card, without even having a bank account.

100,000 (legitimate!) merchants worldwide accept Bitcoin - http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/bitcoin-now-accepted-by-100000-merc... It is time to kill the myth of "only the dark web accepts Bitcoin".

Admittedly, my dark web remark was an exaggeration, however, it remains a practical truth for every day life. In the overwhelming majority of locales, bitcoin cannot be used to pay for groceries, insurance, utilities, rent/mortage, fuel, student loans, daycare, tuition, taxes, medical expenses, phone service, car payments or pretty much any of the common expenses someone might need to pay for. Newegg, Tiger Direct, Microsoft etc are all great companies, but for most people those companies only account for a small number of purchases per year.

The reality is that using bitcoin as money is very impractical, that's just a fact.

All systems that require adoption are, initially, impractical.

Bitcoin is becoming more and more practical as more and more merchants adopt it. Again: 100,000 merchants accept Bitcoin today, and this number is (so far) increasing rapidly.

> All systems that require adoption are, initially, impractical.

I agree with that. It seems we agree that bitcoin is currently impractical, which is the crux of my argument. Bitcoin is not a practical way to send money unless the recipient already has a bank account and a bitcoin exchange account.

Do you know where that 100k number comes from? I see it said a lot but the only source listed is an ibtimes story saying "an industry source says 100k". Has anyone figured out how it was calculated?

BitPay alone has 50k merchants: http://blog.bitpay.com/2015/03/10/heartland-payment-systems-...

Coinbase has 38k: https://www.coinbase.com/about

Gocoin has 5.5k: https://ihb.io/2015-01-29/news/gocoin-announces-5500-merchan...

That's already 93.5k from merely 3 american bitcoin gateways. Add the rest of the world (China, etc) and it is clear there are 100k or more.

Thanks for the sources.

I'd be curious to see what the active merchants per month actually are for Bitpay and Coinbase. Until then I have a hard time believing they actually have those numbers live given the number of stories I've seen of people visiting stores/restaurants that accept bitcoin only to be told they don't do that anymore.

I think we need to kill the "bitcoin requires a passport" myth as well. I have used bitcoin for 4 years and have never had to present a passport for anything.

Just because you haven't experienced something doesn't mean it's a myth.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/246mlg/bitstamp_blo...

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/25jyf1/bitstamp_ive...

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/26c1y6/buying_bitco...

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2renc7/why_dont_peo...

I could go on, all I did was search /r/bitcoin for the word "passport" and I was overflowing with results.

You brought up having to present a passport as if it were a requirement to using bitcoin, which it is not. Again, you were spreading FUD.

> You brought up having to present a passport as if it were a requirement to using bitcoin

I'm not sure how you read, "a passport is required to use bitcoin" from "I've never had a bank ask me for a passport when opening a bank account". My point, which I substantiated with those /r/bitcoin posts, is that it's not unusual for a bitcoin exchange to ask for a copy of a customer's passport as part of their KYC procedures.

>>This all assumes the exchange will even do business with them following their extensive KYC checks....I've never had a bank require...a passport..

One can deduce from the context that a passport is required to use bitcoin. It's FUD and incorrect.

What do banks require in order to open an account?

From the 1st result on google:

your name, your date of birth, your current address and phone number, Social Security number (in most cases) and your email address.

You don't need any of those to use bitcoin. You don't need any of those to buy or sell bitcoin.

> One can deduce from the context that a passport is required to use bitcoin.

You deduced incorrectly. I'm saying that if the KYC system flags the recipient, for whatever reason, then they will likely be required to produce a passport.

The KYC system is the exchange's, not bitcoin's. It's similar to blaming TCP/IP because a website requires you to use a password to log in.

> The KYC system is the exchange's, not bitcoin's

This is obvious. What is your point? Nobody is arguing that KYC is a requirement of bitcoin. Let me break down exactly what I'm saying:

1. For the vast majority of people, bitcoin is impractical as a method of payment for every day needs.

2. As a result of this, most people don't want bitcoins, and instead prefer legal tender that is usable wherever they might need to spend it.

3. The most practical and least stressful method for converting bitcoins into legal tender is through an exchange.

4. Exchanges have KYC procedures.

Very simple.

>Not to mention the fact that the recipient needs a bank account anyway if they want to convert their bitcoin into something that they can actually spend outside of the dark web.

I guess you've never read https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

No, I haven't read the list of locations where bitcoin is accepted. The reason for this is, like most people, I have a bank account and don't need to double check that I can actually pay for dinner and a movie before I patronize an establishment.

Except you weren't patronizing an establishment. You were spreading FUD.

What you call "FUD", the rest of the world calls "reality". Bitcoin is currently impractical as money, that's just a fact. The few businesses that accept bitcoin aren't even close to enough to make bitcoin practical for every day needs.

I'm not saying bitcoin is practical as money. I'm saying it is practical as a payment system, if anything. Just look at the gigantic $100,000,000 bitcoin transactions that happen and only pay a $0.20 or so fee.

Besides that, bitcoin is so profoundly different than traditional money systems it can't possibly be practical as money so soon. It shouldn't be practical as money so soon, but it is making progress.

So that is 2 requirements for bitcoin versus 5 requirements for sending via facebook: bank acct, debit/credit card, email acct, facebook acct, facebook messenger (let's not forget the immense amount of personal information you willingly give away).

Yet, bitcoin seems like way more friction?

Never heard of Venmo.

Haven't the Japanese had NFC payments forever?

I want the govt / central banks to do it.

Move to Ecuador :) http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-28992589

It's an interesting feature, but it seems unlikely that enough people will add their card information to Facebook to make it worthwhile, considering that both the payor and payee need CC information included for the payment to work.

On a related note, this continues Facebook's unfortunate user-interface decision to replace the simple "send" button in Facebook Messenger with a row of increasingly crowded and not-particularly-useful buttons to send various "other" things.

After a week or so for people to adopt it send out $1 gifts to 100,000 (or however many that will represent a rounding error in dollars) people with accounts meeting some set of activity requirements, who have not yet signed up. They then have to enter their info to claim it, once their info is entered they have no barrier to use it and may send money to others further spreading it.

Also publicize that you will be giving like $1,000 to 100 lucky fb pay users who have performed at least 5 transactions, after 2 months of fb pay.

I mean Facebook just needs to get a decent initial seed of people to add their info, and for it to be so painfully stupidly easy that every relative on Facebook can now send their nephews/nieces and grand children those $5 birthday gifts so that it spreads.

Plus Facebook can mine the FB social graph to figure out which people to incentivize with gift payments, to maximize viral spreading.

You only need to convince the payer. The recipient gets an email that says "You have money waiting, let us give it to you."

No, they then tell the payer, pay me with this instead, I don't want to sign up for this. The usual use case is giving money back for restaurants and such, so you have the social closeness to do this.

FB is in a unique situation where they can convert at a pretty high rate.

Seems to work pretty well for PayPal.

The Payee will be reasonably motivated to add their CC to retrieve the funds.

Like the thumbs up? Why is that the DEFAULT button there?

It turns into the send button as soon as you start typing

Why is it unlikely that enough people will add their card information to Facebook?

I'm curious, too. Given that they have hundreds of millions of users and most (that I know) don't seem to care one way or the other about the privacy implications, I don't see usage being an issue at all.

Agreed, the network effect works seriously in FB's favour here. Do I add my payment details and get back the £20 an acquaintance sent me or do I wait until I see them and hope we both remember?

Once you're signed up then FB have dropped the barrier to making further payments with their platform, which presumably is the purpose of this from their point of view.

I've never really been on FB that much, so this may be fueled by that.. but i would hate adding my CC info to FB. Generally speaking i am very loose with my CC.. i don't worry about it too much, and give it out often. With that said though, FB (to an outsider) has had a history of sketchy FB apps doing sketchy shit with your data/feed/etc. This has seemed to install a distrust of FB and the FB-app ecosystem in me.

Not sure if that's common or not, and i'm sure i'm in the minority, but nevertheless i figure it's a valid thought. To be clear, i'm not saying that they shouldn't be trusted, i'm saying that to a FB-ignorant person, i'm not too trusting of them.

Note: This has nothing to do with anti FB/"FB data" type of people.

It's not that people won't eventually add their debit card

Your payee has to a) have the FB app installed, b) have a debit card, c) from a US-based bank and d) agree to add that debit card to the FB app.

It's more than just "pay on FB". Enough little hurdles to present immediate adoption friction. Many people know that you can do chargebacks on CCs but can't do that for debit cards so they have reservations about adding that debit card to online transactions (never mind that FB Pay is likely just using ACH in the background).

They already made a lot of transactions before so they already own a lot of credit card info already:

* gifts

* promote personal posts on news feed

* ads (promote page posts)

* some messages (you had to pay to send a message to mark for example)

* people who enter it just so they can recover their password more easily

Square Cash and Venmo are quite popular. I wouldn't be so sure.

What's your definition of popular?

It's interesting to note that this is yet another trend that came from Asia. Like stickers, another feature that was recently added to Messenger, this feature has long been in apps like Tencent's WeChat.

And it's used extensively there. Just last month, during Chinese New Year, WeChat added a feature that let Chinese users send money to their WeChat contacts, following in the tradition where people give red envelopes of money (红包) to family members and friends. From what I hear, it was incredibly popular—I even received one myself from a Chinese friend.

I wouldn't underestimate the potential popularity of this move. Especially once they open this up to countries outside the US.

Given the number of people that have their fb accounts hacked every day, I'd be pretty concerned about giving Facebook my credit card info too.

If I were Facebook I'd require anyone using the Pay feature to turn on two factor authentication.

Yes, they should do that. And I can't think of anything more annoying than needing to receive a text, just so I can log into dumb old Facebook. (I realize there are other "factors" available but that's not really the point.)

Or, they could do it lazily. I.e., only force the 2FA at the time of money send / receive.

I skimmed through the comments and thought "What is Venmo and how terrible am I for not knowing about it sooner?"

I then searched for the term on the page and noticed that the term is largely clustered around two threads; one of which the users both drop the name so much I had to check if they worked for the company.

No offense to those who enjoy Venmo and its services, but this thread is a great example of HN commentary echo; it's way louder in here than it actually is.

Among the disjoint groups of my own friends and my girlfriends' friends (none of whom code or are tech savvy at all), everyone I know in NYC uses Venmo. I learned about it from non-tech people. It could be because Venmo advertised very heavily in NYC mass transit a long time ago.

My friends in the Bay Area, in contrast, are far less likely to know about Venmo and either use none of these options or are pretty fragmented.

YMMV, of course :) it just seems like Venmo has done really well in one particularly large market, and the other ones are still way more fragmented.

That sounds perfectly reasonable and I could totally believe it. Many of these services seem to have an adoption in NYC or SF that may not be representative of other areas.

I'm in SF and nearly everyone I know uses Venmo. YMMV

Actually, I think it's an example of a generation gap. HN skews older than Venmo.

http://www.businessinsider.com/venmo-splitting-a-group-check...

I'm sure that they have statistics to back up their target demographic, but I would probably apply a geographic layer onto those numbers and see where that leaves 'em.

I just did a quick run through of my office (Minneapolis/St Paul snowboard, etc. online retailer): asking who has heard of it or uses it. Of the 30 or so I asked, 1 person has it on his phone and he says he never uses it.

I _did_ have a conversation where I was told 'I usually pick it up then they get me back later' which a few people in earshot agreed with.

Maybe there needs to be an app to track who owes you drinks?

I also did read through that article, and the one shot of someone asking for $3.00 to put someone's suit in a bag is hilarious to me.

Back in my day, I thought we called those things favors. :)

The thing I don't like about this is that I'm forced to become Facebook friends with someone to send or receive money. That's an unnecessary layer of consideration.

I want to send and receive money quickly, easily, and cheaply. Now I'm also seeing what Ted is up to on my news feed. He's my Facebook friend now because we were all at a restaurant last week and they didn't let us split the bill.

I don't think you need to be friends with a person in order to do this. You can send normal messages to users who are not friends so I think payment will also have this ability.

I think the idea is to get adoption for friend-to-friend transfers first; I have no doubt that if this gains traction, then you'll soon be able to send to non-friends.

You don't have to be friends with someone to send them a message. If they're a friend of a friend then they'll be easy to find.

The only reason this "problem" remains to be solved is that the US banking industry can't get their act together. Most of the rest of the industrialized world has had near-instantaneous bank-to-bank transfers for more than a decade. Here's a good story contrasting the UK system with the US: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-...

Expect all of these virtual wallet payment systems to die a swift death once Visa/Mastercard/Citi/Bank Of America/Chase finally pulls their finger out.

A natural addition. And just like Square Cash, just enter bank issued debit card for fee-free transactions.

Now if it would work outside the US and in-between different countries, that'd be the killer app. Is there anything close to that dream?

How often do international transactions actually occur though (for small payments between friends)? I feel like it is such a small market it probably is not worth the extra hassle from a legal/fraud standpoint.

As for outside the US, I was under the impression that most banks provide a free service for these transactions.

Remittances are one of the largest capital flows to developing countries totaling $400 billion in 2014.

As they say, if you could capture 1% of that market ...

... then you still wouldn't make much money because the margins are so low.

> just enter bank issued debit card for fee-free transactions.

IIRC, Square is only able to do this by abusing the "refund" feature of debit cards to credit money to those accounts. I read an article a while back that claimed the banks were not happy about this, and considering shutting it down (or rate-limiting it) in the future.

I believe that was only speculation as to the method.. Though the alternative that was speculated was transfers at a loss to Square (with an increased user base as the motive).

Check out transferwise.com.

Definitely second transferwise. I use it all the time, and it's fast and easy without seeming skeevy like Western Union or whatever.

What's the catch?

So far, none that have caught up with me. It does what it says on the tin, and it's cheap and fast. I'm not sure there is a catch.

I guess that's what https://www.circle.com tries to be. I haven't personally tried them tough.

Deleted comment

https://transferwise.com/ run an absolutely amazing service. It's not instant but it saves a lot of money on forex fees.

... and insurance-free, as opposed to credit cards

I'm surprised they don't seem to be using any kind of wallet. From the description, transactions are only bank-to-bank, with a typical 2-3 day ACH delay. So if I pay my friend Joe $20 today, and he pays me $20 tomorrow, it still takes days to settle up. And the only record of the transaction is embedded in the chat? A wallet would have it settled up instantly.

Interesting. Facebook has over 1.1 billion users, but their existing financial systems (Facebook credits, etc) process only 1 million transactions a day. I would have thought it was higher. Of course, that's daily, so another way to look at it is 0.1% of Facebook users pay for something on Facebook on a given day, which strangely feels high.

>Facebook has over 1.1 billion users

People really need to stop repeating this. As someone with over 30+ Facebook accounts (for games) and knows lots of other Facebook gaming friends with 10+ accounts as well as non-gamers who keep 2+ accounts (primary, parents/relatives, cosplay/hobby, work, etc...). I'd discount whatever number Facebook reports by at least 20%.

Well it's also 1.1 billion active users per month, so that makes it slightly better IMO.

I wonder if there's potential for this to be a content-creator-payment platform? That is, make tipping a publication as easy as hitting a "Like" on any given story...you could even have it as an extra button (I think making it a default pop-up with every "Like" would be detrimental to the user experience, to the point that users would just stop hitting "Like" for stories they actually liked)...it wouldn't make much money for FB, perhaps, but it would create further adoption of the platform.

Edit: Not only might it increase adoption for the payments system, but it may further entice content creators to join FB's nascent content-platform ambitions: http://digiday.com/platforms/facebook-youtube-premium/

I already have a way to send money for free to any of my Facebook friends: Venmo.

I have had Venmo for about 4 years now (it started at my school so we were early) and it is tied with Lyft for the startup I could not live without. Last year I sent ~$8,000 and received about $8,500 on Venmo. So a $500 diff but the amount of time it saved me versus transferring that $16,000 any other way is many, many hours.

I don't think Venmo does too well as a business (processing cash for free for years can't be good business) but they have nailed the user experience.

I love Venmo and use it with a number of friends but I'm getting sick of the "Do you have Venmo? No, Ok PayPal? No, Ok, well I can setup snapcash if you have it setup? No, ever heard of square cash?....." As much as I hate caving into the "Almighty Book of Faces" I will probably enter my card to help facilitate payments with friends. I use Venmo to pay my parents for loans in their name, for my sisters sorority dues, for pizza, beer, etc. I will keep Venmo for sure and prefer it over FB Pay but I'm really worried FB is going to kill Venmo with this move....

I wonder who doesnt have his pay service yet.

Id rather use bitcoin.

Now I see why they hired former paypal guys, David Marcus [1] and Stan Chudnovsky [2]

Although I'm sure the team had been working on it for a while (given these were relatively new hires), bringing in the paypal executives helps them have a smoother launch and scale process.

1: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmarcus

2: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanchudnovsky

I think it's interesting that we can now pay almost anybody we have contact with, at almost zero effort and without even having to remove my debit card from my wallet.

You can pay people via gmail now for your email contacts, send money to your personal friends via social media networking. I bought my Uber to work this morning completely frictionless without having to physically use my card.

It's an interesting development of recent years for sure.

I mean, in reality, we are just back where we started. cash & checkbooks used to do this very well, until people needed online payments.

Not really. Cash and checkbooks require you pulling out a some form of tender, divvying out the correct amount or writing the amount out, and then handing the tender to the cashier.

Now, using Uber as an example, I request a car, get into the car, and leave the car. You never even need to open the app back up after requesting a car.

How are we back where we started? If I need to send my friend a payment and they are not in the same room with me, I couldn't do it with cash or checkbooks. Now I could send a friend money in about 5 clicks on my phone.

Cash is nearly useless for payments between friends becase everyone only ever has $20s, if they have cash at all.

The old jwz quote: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. "

And the Cargill corollary: "Every social media company attempts to expand until it can become a bank. Those companies which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. Here a bank is defined as some entity that stores and records transactions between people "

Digital wallet is a huge trend everywhere right now. Besides PayPal, Square, Google, Apple, Facebook is finally joining the game. FYI, billions are flowing through similar service from Tencent's WeChat(aka Weixin) and Weibo during this year's Chinese's new year and giving and receiving red envelop money via digital wallet became a new way of Chinese social phenomena.

Facebook on the shutting down of their email service:

"It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement," the company wrote in its announcement blog post for the feature. The service didn't catch on, perhaps in part because Facebook never truly created a friendly or familiar interface for emailing. [0]

In much the same vain, wouldn't it be that users wouldn't like to tolerate their friends who are going to bug them about the $20 they owe from last time since now they have no excuse to avoid payment. Because they can do it right there in the messenger?

This is going to be a whole new level of friends/family and money don't get on pretty well. Maybe just me though.

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-i...

That possibility a really good point. It gives a lot of people, whether they owe or are owed, a strong reason to avoid actively using FB, the same way people avoid logging into chat because they don't want to feel obligated to chat with certain people. People who owe will feel guilty and not want to appear, while people who are owed will feel angry that they're not being paid back when it's so simple.

Wow, this is a really interesting play by Facebook to gather finance details of their users. I can absolutely see an scenario where friend X wants to pay friend Y who hasn't enabled Pay and they nag until friend Y does sign up. The cycle will continue. It's probably part of a bigger venture into eCommerce for Facebook.

I think they're aiming to enable people to buy from ads without ever leaving Facebook. Reduces friction for the buyer and has the potential to be a major source of revenue from ecommerce companies.

I'm sure they realize how much money Google is printing with their shopping campaigns, and FB ads haven't proven to be very rewarding for ecommerce outside of fashion/lifestyle. Adding a major feature like that would be enormous in grabbing some of that market.

Can't upvote hard enough.

User-to-user is just one piece of the puzzle. Facebook has faced a REAL uphill battle convincing advertisers of the value they add in the path to conversion. Anyone who is familiar with cross-channel attribution knows this all to well. Many of FB's recent updates have been big slaps in the face to many advertisers, but this could be a huge win.

It would in essence enable them to go from being what is typically one of the first points in the "generating awareness" stage to being a last touch success. Most advertisers are not savvy to things like attribution (hence one of the reasons AdWords still focuses on last click in their main UI), so being able to say to businesses "here is how much money you earned directly and immediately from your ad" is a huge win for proving the value they add.

Any PMs or engineers at FB--would love to chat with you about this and how it ties into the attribution picture. Seriously--it's a huge problem for you right now.

"and they nag until friend Y does sign up"

Despite gmails best efforts to block the dozens of emails offering to send me money, I still get a couple once in awhile, and like most internet users I'm pretty good at deleting them without falling for the scam.

I suspect life will be very rough on early adopters.

A lot of people are commenting about Facebook being "yet another entrant" into the wallet & payment game. I'd enjoy the ease and simplicity of having everyone on a single payment platform as much as the next guy, but it's simply not realistic. There's too much at stake for Google, Apple, Paypal, Square etc. to just give up.

Instead, I could see this taking a similar direction as web authentication: instead of "Login with Google+" or "Login with Facebook" buttons, you have "Send $ to Google Wallet" in your FB-pay interface.

I'd also point out that Facebook, by virtue of having a ton of data about their users, is well positioned to do things like identity assertion and fraud analytics; two of the more critical aspects of digital payment. Makes sense to me that they join the fray.

It also makes sense for businesses to consider them as a payment option given the reach, and if it takes off, the likelihood that a user will keep their payment details current.

Expired credit card churn is a huge issue for any successful SaaS business, and someone is much more likely to keep their payment details updated with a service they pay through regularly than they are entering one-off CC info. Adding FB to the mix with Apple, Amazon, Paypal and Google would make sense for a lot of companies (although probably entails a whole host of headaches).

Honestly, I'd feel very uncomfortable making giving money this easy. Even with a physical wallet, it's still a two-step process.

Depending on the arbitrary counting methodology you want to use you could easily say this is the same amount of steps. For your physical wallet you take wallet out, you get money, you swipe, you sign. For Facebook the first time you open a chat with your friend, you click button, get wallet out, you enter information, you enter amount, you send. The subsequent times it's you opening a chat with your friend, clicking the button, entering the amount, sending.

I'm just trying to illustrate that the amount of steps required is arbitrary and doesn't really indicate security. Sure feeling uncomfortable is fine but at least this way is safer than a physical wallet simply because you can't have your cards or cash stolen and worst case your phone is stolen you can login on a computer and deauthorize the phone (plus you can use a pin).

I'm assuming I would already be in a Facebook conversation with the person, so the number of steps would be relatively low. Without that assumption, Facebook is (mildly) more difficult than a physical wallet.

I use Square cash sometimes and I think it's pretty good, I don't think I would use this. A Facebook account is already a target for hacking, let alone bringing payment info into the situation.

If a friend had this but didn't have Square, that wouldn't be enough to sway me to put my CC in Facebook. I just don't think I can bring myself to do that.

I believe this was called project 419 internally.

Not in a million years I will give my financial info to Facebook. Not. Fucking. Happening. Ever.

"Need a ultra-secured phoned with 2 level authentication on messages "

What happens if I lose my phone , someone adds himself and send money , oh crap ! But Facebook knows where we are sending money , will it be helpful enough to nab a thief ?

You can add a PIN that you need to enter every time you try to send money

It would be interesting if a user's social graph could be used to assess creditworthiness. If so they could remove a lot of friction either by reducing fees or assuming a certain degree of credit upfront.

There are companies that already do this: http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/26/technology/social/facebook-c...

It's interesting that the B-Roll video is not hosted on Facebook.

BTW I just send money using PayPal to a Facebook friend and let him know using Facebook messenger. I would totally use this when it's available.

Free? How? Any company charge you processing fees when you use credit card

It's debit card not credit card, so usually they just pay a small flat fee of a couple of cents. Small enough to not pass on to the customer.

Does anybody know how Venmo and now FB can send/wire between debit cards for free? What happens to the % Visa/Mastercard demand? Is something like this coming for Stripe?

Venmo uses actual ACH transactions which are free, it's like writing a check but there is a delay. FB, Snapchat, and others are likely eating the cost of the debit card "swipe" in hopes of garnering users.

Do they somehow find the ACH info (bank account) from the debit card?

Can I say Facebook is just a copycat of Wechat, Weibo and other Internet services on this feature? Hundreds of millions of Chinese have used these feature for more than one year.

This is a game changer. I love venmo and its Facebook integration, but not everyone wants to set up a new account. This is going to make sending money to friends really easy.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple follows the trend and introduces payments through imessage. They could make it pretty simple if they link it to Apple Pay/Touch ID.

Introducing Snapcash! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBwjxBmMszQ

10K likes to 13K dislikes on that video and comments now disabled.

Guess that indicates how much people like Snapcash.

Do people honestly conduct this much commerce with their friends and family that they require an intermediary service for it?

I think this would be more interesting in WhatsApp than in Facebook Messenger, because the different kind of graph you have.

Did they build out this technology themselves, or was it through an acquisition?

On a side note - no AmEx or Bank Account option...

at this point, who cares? You can do this everywhere, and I will definitely try and pick a dedicated service (probably Venmo) to do this. I know they spend all of their time and energy working on it, rather than it just being a feature

Any news if this will be opened up through one of their Developer API's?

Next step: Connecting in-app-payments so they can be paid by someone else.

> This feature will be rolling out over the coming months in the US.

Fucking typical.

Oh, yes, like I'm going to give FB my credit card info.

What's funny about this is that this happens to be snapchat's monetization strategy, too. It's funny because FB wanted to buy snapchat, snapchat said no, and now FB has implemented their strategy.

I'm amused.

Finally, i can satisfy the urge to send money to friends.

Seriously?

Far from the first person to mention it, but im fairly sure we have had this for a while.

http://i.imgur.com/lczQmNQ.png

Deleting Square Cash and Paypal...

"Dear Sir/Madam,"

"I am a wealthy Nigerian heir of our national oil company. I need my funds unlocked but unfortunately do not have $100 for internet access. Please send $100 and you will get your share of my inheritance in the billions of dollar."

does this say something about how fast snapchat is innovating?

Considering we've had Venmo[1], wallet/gmail[2] and Square Cash[3] since 2013, not really.

[1]: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/after-2-years-in-be...

[2]: http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2013/05/send-money-to-fri...

[3]: http://allthingsd.com/20131015/the-money-is-in-the-email/

which of these were a way to send money through a social network's chat client?

SnapCash and SquareCash are one & the same. I think it's a great convenience to add CC to my FB, but since I do not use a real name, do not trust FB, and would be concerned about my account being compromised (though it probably makes you enter a CSC/PIN), I will not be using this any time in the near future.

I personally use SquareCash all the time, and also use PNC bank's complimentary POPmoney setup to transfer funds for free (with PNC, I scheduled a partial rent payment to go to my landlord's bank account automatically every paycheck).

Snapcash. Send money that disappears after a few seconds.

http://blog.snapchat.com/post/102895720555/introducing-snapc...

Snapchat is not the first one having payment via chat. Afaik wechat had that long time ago.

But this totally tells us about how slow facebook is moving. They had 100x people, 100x money but still end up 2x slower.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com