It’s a mechanism that is compulsory in EU (and nearby countries like Switzerland).
When you try to spend money online (without the plastic card), you need a second factor. In practice in, let’s say, Amazon there is an iframe with a page of your bank that asks to confirm the operation on the banking app or insert the code they sent you by SMS or things like that
If you lived in the medieval, would you have rooted for the apocalypse?
Dude, have you read the article? this is from an article on Nature.
Nature! Not the flat earth society scientific newsletter.
For publishing on Nature it is necessary that a number of the most well reputed experts in the field have peer reviewed the article.
By modern standard of “science”, publishing on Nature or Science is the closest to get to “consensus”.
I see your point in some newspapers articles but this is not one of that cases
Required: only in EU Available: EU close countries (UK, Switzerland, etc)
In the US banking is a bit different than over here. People still pay rent with checks (that in EU are de facto obsolete) possibly sent in an envelope via mail.
You may wonder why…. Because a money transfer (that in EU is generally for free) in US is often a double digit operation.