JWZ’s law
states that “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.” A
corollary is that every complex system expands until it becomes a bank.
Yesterday, I wrote about how a chatbot for organizing coffee orders became a full-fledged bank.
Now, here’s a 4chan post
explaining a dumb/clever way of using Gamestop stores as fee-free
banking institutions by pre-ordering (and pre-paying) for games, then
cancelling your orders and getting a refund (to make a withdrawal), and
ordering new games (to make a deposit). It’s fee-free, and as a
pre-orderer, you get all the bonus stuff (your bank pays you!).
This is probably more of a reflection of the total dysfunction of
banking, where low interest rates and hidden inflation, as well as high
fees, conspire to bleed out savers to pay for reckless speculation, but
it’s still a pretty clever way of getting fee-free banking from an
institution with more branches, and better hours, than many banks.
Since Barclays have games on their website now this may just be a case of convergence – eventually everyone will be a retail, banking, gaming conglomerate…
