Venmo Now Charging 1% Instead of $0.25 Flat

For those of you who are unaware, Venmo is a payment app that was bought out by PayPal a while back. They essentially hybridized social media with a payment service that anyone can download on their phone. Using Venmo, one can send money directly to phone numbers that have an account.

Personally, I think it's a nifty little app. My roommates and I use it all the time. We even pay our landlord with Venmo.

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In any case, Venmo started offering the ability to transfer money from your account to your debit card instantly for a 25 cent flat fee. I used it a few times and thought it was a pretty incredible deal. For 25 cents, they were basically fronting the money for the funds to be available instantly until the real transaction went through.

I logged in recently to see that this fee had been changed to 1% with a minimum of 25 cents and a maximum of $10. Now this is a fee structure that I much more expected. I wonder if they planned it all along. Hook people in with the good deal and then jack up the price. It's also very possible that the 25 cents just wasn't enough income to justify the service.

The funny thing is this fee capitalizes on the fact that Americans are trained to have horrible money management skills. Low attention spans, got-to-have-it-now attitudes reign supreme. Living paycheck to paycheck. You seriously can't wait 2 or 3 days for $60 to appear in your account? That is so extremely alarming.

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None of this matters though, because crypto is about to come along and blow services like this out of the water. I can move $10,000 on the Ethereum network for a penny to anywhere in the world within minutes without anyone being able to freeze the transaction. Try to beat that, traditional banking.

It's developments like this that really give us a preview of how superior cryptocurrency really is compared to the established norm. Once the tipping point is reached and enough network effect has been attained, there will be no stopping it.