Venmo or Ven-no?
If you have been following me for a while, you know I have a love/hate relationship with the cash sending app Venmo. While Venmo seems to only be available inside the US, I am sure there are countless other similar apps out there depending on the country you live in.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things to (I) like about Venmo. It allows you to quickly and easily send money to someone else for pretty much any reason you can think of. Here are a couple examples:
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I was out to lunch the other day with my in-laws. My father in law picked up the bill, but the "kids" wanted to cover the tip. We decided to leave cash so that our server could hopefully get all of it as opposed to a share of it if it had been tacked onto the credit card. I only had a dollar in cash, so my sister in law covered the full portion and I just Venmo'd her my share.
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Likewise, this past Super Bowl I took part in a couple of gambling boards. It was nice being able to just Venmo my brother in law the money for my squares as opposed to trying to remember the next time I saw him (which could be months) that I owed him money.
I personally hate owing people money, so the idea of being able to "settle up" instantaneously is very appealing to me.
As another example, I was driving home one day this past summer and decided to stop at a road side stand to buy some produce. I had cash with me on this occasion, but luckily if I hadn't, they had a Venmo QR code that I could have scanned and paid that way.
So I can pay for goods by scanning a QR code or send money to friends/relatives simply by knowing their email address or Venmo user ID (which is generally pretty short and intuitive).
It is miraculously easy! Plus the fact that the name of the company has actually become a verb ("I will Venmo you the money"), tells me that it definitely has some staying power.
And then there is the bad...
I think the main thing that really grinds my gears about Venmo and makes me absolutely want to hate it is the fact that we should be using crypto to do all of this.
It is clear that there is a use case for sending free or low fee payments to friend, relatives, and vendors, so why are we still required to rely on the old tired fiat system for this sort of thing.
Sure, there are some shops out there that accept crypto, and if you have friends or relatives that are savvy enough, you can probably shoot some LTC (or whatever) their way fairly easily.
Plus, crypto would allow you to do these same sorts of things globally. Sure, maybe there are some apps like Venmo that allow you to share beyond the US, but if that is the case, they aren't that popular over here, or at least they don't have the name recognition that Venmo does.
Thankfully, there are chains like Hive, and tools like FIO that will hopefully have people on a mass scale sharing money back and forth without the long and complex public keys and things like that.
Take note developers!
This actually gets me thinking... Wouldn't it be cool for there to just be a stand alone (lite) Hive Wallet smartphone app that would carry out the same functions as the Venmo app. If Hive really picks up the way many think it might, it could be really cool to see that sort of thing happen. Not everyone is/is going to be a blogger on Hive, so they many not want to have to do a full login to one of the front ends to carry out wallet transactions.
Do you use Venmo? If you live outside the US, do you use something else? Does it drive you as crazy as it does me that we aren't just doing this sort of thing with Crypto? I dragged my feet for a long time before I finally installed the app. I used to make fun of my brother in law for using it, but I can definitely see the benefits now that I have taken the plunge.
Sports Talk Social - @bozz.sports
@eos.detroit Staff Writer/BOID Team Leader
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