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Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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