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”.