I am European too and while we have better payment systems than in the US it's far from perfect. If you're referring to a SEPA transfer it is at least an order of magnitude more friction than handing over cash to someone.
In NL the iDeal system and Tikkie have -according to me- less friction than cash, and surely not for any large amount if you are on the receiving side (no need to have any change, money won’t be fake, you won’t have to deposit it, you can request a specific amount or let it open for the other person). Here’s some info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEALhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment#Tikkie
They’re used by people of all age, as far as I can tell; the only time I witnessed a problem with it, was when a ~50 year old man had to pay me 600€ for stuff he bought, and I ended up having to take cash. Worth noting that person who paid me is a house painter, a job with a great potential for being paid cash to evade taxes to begin with…
I did not know about these systems, thanks for enlightening me. Now I am a bit jealous my own country (France) does not have anything like this (as far as I know).
They were also impressive for me, having moved here; I’ve heard iDeal should become a EU-wide thing.
I added in my original post links to wikipedia, if you want more details. The section “criticism” is quite funny: it works like cash money (no guarantees from the bank if you get scammed, it’s not a credit card), and there might be some downtime at some point (1 day/year in total).
