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How ACH works: A developer perspective (2014)

engineering.gusto.com

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Re: How ACH works: A developer perspective (2014)

#21

Post by tomschlick »

hatsunearu wrote: post #15
tomschlick wrote: post #13

The exciting thing about all these crypto currencies to me, is that banks could roll their own private "exchange" currency to do near real time transfers to any other bank / account.

I dont understand why people hype up cryptocurrency for this purpose. The whole reason for existence of cryptocurrency is a way to achieve consensus without having a real central authority. What's wrong with having the bank as a central authority in their own banking system?

I was referring to transfers between banks. I believe currently they go through the Federal Reserve in batches. A more distributed system could allow banks to transfer directly to/from each other in near real time.

Re: How ACH works: A developer perspective (2014)

#22

Post by microcolonel »

peterwwillis wrote: post #11
iokevins wrote: post #8

At least it's secure and usually FTPS...hopefully using TLS 1.2+ cryptographic protocol. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7636066

Which is a bit like saying, at least the 70mph mountain pass road has a guard rail.

Well, if not TLS, then what would you use? Noise?

TLS is the only widely deployed standard cryptographic protocol which has ever protected any internet communication to any degree. For its many flaws and patchwork, there is nothing even competing in the category.

Re: How ACH works: A developer perspective (2014)

#26

Post by Lazare »

tomschlick wrote: post #13

The exciting thing about all these crypto currencies to me, is that banks could roll their own private "exchange" currency to do near real time transfers to any other bank / account.

> banks could roll their own private "exchange" currency to do near real time transfers to any other bank

If only US banks already had access to some sort of shared currency they could use for such transfers!

Snark aside, this just seems like a horrible use for a crypto currency. Block chains are an interesting tool to solve a lack of trust when you're willing to give up some speed and convenience. Banks have full trust in themselves, the central banks, and the clearing houses that make the financial system work; they just need to update their systems to be faster.

When your problem is that you have trust and need speed, a solution which sacrifices speed to work in situations where you don't have trust is probably not a good option.

Re: How ACH works: A developer perspective (2014)

#27

Post by rodgerd »

I work in banking and it's always interesting to:

1/ See people encounter how these things work, because there's usually a sense of lost innocence about it. (If they stick around long enough they come to understand that dealing with hundreds of years of history is why glib "re-imagine everything" solutions tend to come a cropper).

2/ Continually discover that by the standards of the rest of the world, US banking is even more like banging rocks together.

Re: How ACH works: A developer perspective (2014)

#28

Post by corndoge »

joshribakoff wrote: post #6

I had an integrator request this so I stood up a nodeJS server that only implements upload, not download. This way if they leaked their own password, a malicious actor is limited to forging data, and no real data can be leaked. Because it didn't work in FileZilla, they didn't want to use it. Worked at another company that shuffled data between big name gyms & health insurance companies, it also used CSV files sent ov…

why use a huge codebase like node for such a simple security critical task

Re: How ACH works: A developer perspective (2014)

#30

Post by zodiac »

tomschlick wrote: post #21
hatsunearu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont understand why people hype up cryptocurrency for this purpose. The whole reason for existence of cryptocurrency is a way to achieve consensus without having a real central authority. What's wrong with having the bank as a central authority in their own banking system?

I was referring to transfers between banks. I believe currently they go through the Federal Reserve in batches. A more distributed system could allow banks to transfer directly to/from each other in near real time.

A centralised system would also "allow banks to transfer directly to/from each other in near real time"
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