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When I do money transfers on bank accounts, I read the 10 digits 4-5 times. If the person that I'm transfering to is in the room, I ask them to read aloud their account number as I follow.

The fact that you have to get 10 digits right and that a typo can result in sending the money off somewhere unknown, disturbs me a lot. It's amazing how cryptocurrencies mimicked that part about existing digital money to perfection.

Give me a QR code, or wire my wallet up with an address book.



Account numbers have checksums.

An „off by one“ typo cannot occur.


I wouldn't trust all banks to have such things in their account numbers.

Especially in the tech age where they seem to think they're beyond physical keyboard typos and OCR errors.


What are you talking about? IBAN account numbers have not one, but two digit checksums.


I probably don't live in the same part of the world as you. IBAN account numbers are not common here at all.


That only proves that banks in your part of the world are way behind the state of the art. The one thing it doesn't prove -- I hope you didn't think it does? -- is that Crypto/Blockchain is necessary for international currency transfers (as some deluded poster here tried to argue a week or two ago).


Do you know how account numbers work in every bank in every country?


In Canada we use email for person-to-person money transfers. I transfer money to my contacts by email address. They then get an email which informs them they have a pending transfer, and allows them to deposit it into their bank account.

You can optionally register your email with the central system for autodeposit.


That’s available in most US banks as well, but direct account to account transfer via account number is also possible.




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