I recently had a family member with a medical emergency in a foreign country with only 1 direct flight to cross an ocean, and there was a narrow window of time to buy the very limited supply of lie flat seats needed to make the trip so medical care could be resumed as quickly as possible.

It was nice to be able to spend $30k+ on short notice. With modern security features, there is no need to enforce an arbitrary time limit if the depositor accepts the risks.

[delayed]

Bit late. But people who can spend $30k+ on a plane ticket usually have other ways to pay that type of thing, in my experience, like credit cards.

Also, I'm really happy I have insurance for this type of thing.

No, the banking system just runs so perennially behind the times that they suffer from baroque issues that no one else has had in 20 years.

Eg the above example; how is it possible to send money without knowing who the other side is? I can trivially look up a domain name and see registration info, I can look up the IP to see who it’s registered to, I can check certs to see if they’re valid and legit.

It’s bizarre how normal we think it is to send large sums to random strings of digits that we think are Amazon or the IRS with basically 0 way to validate them.

I bought a house in cash and putting the money in escrow was unbelievably stressful. They send me numbers, on a printout that’s a scan of a scan of a scan with text that says “call to make sure this is still the right account number”, and a bajillion warnings to make sure the number is right or vague and terrible things might happen.

Insanity that I can get insanely complicated gadgets shipped to my house in 4 hours but we don’t have a better way to move 6 figure sums than “double check your numbers”.

In Finland at least there’s now recipient (name) verification, so it absolutely can be done. When you transfer money to someone, it will check your input against the true account holder and will warn if they don’t match. You can ignore the warning at your own peril.

[delayed]