Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

juxt.pro

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 223 posts

Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

#171

Post by acdha »

yladiz wrote: post #170

Serious question, and I apologize for the strong language: why should I give a shit about the language a service I consume is written in? Why does it matter it’s in Clojure? I am professionally a Clojure dev so it’s cool to see something written in Clojure like this, but why should I care about that? This is one of the things I really dislike about the community. Yes, Clojure is a powerful language, and I really enjo…

Typically it’s most important for languages which haven’t yet hit the level of acceptance that people still worry about being allowed to use them. I remember back in the 90s PHP and Python developers sharing examples like that because it answered business questions like “why aren’t we using Microsoft’s ASP?”

Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

#172

Post by varispeed »

toyg wrote: post #27
varispeed wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These "challenger" banks are a gimmick. Friend of mine recently tried to set up an account for his new business and all "challengers" refused a business account, they were slow to respond and disinterested in helping. Eventually he set up with a high street bank, but the whole thing took over a month, which is ridiculous.

That's surprising. Starling opened a business account for me in less than 3 days. This was back in 2018 though.

Starling was particularly bad. Maybe they stopped caring...

Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

#173

Post by varispeed »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #152
varispeed wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These "challenger" banks are a gimmick. Friend of mine recently tried to set up an account for his new business and all "challengers" refused a business account, they were slow to respond and disinterested in helping. Eventually he set up with a high street bank, but the whole thing took over a month, which is ridiculous.

That wasn't my experience. I set up an account with HSBC about seven years go, and they were a nightmare. It took over a month to open the account, and everything had to be done in branch. Also, HSBC in the UK is not the same HSBC in other countries. I once had to fly back to London from Athens just to "pop in to my local branch" for some uninteresting bureaucratic process. I closed that account and switched to Tide.…

As I understand, Tide is not a bank.

Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

#174

Post by john-radio »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #169
donatj wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using Wells Fargo for almost thirty years and while I don’t know if it’s still the case, as recent as four years ago their passwords were case insensitive. I’ll take a little sane fintech in my banking please.

Why is case sensitivity in passwords important? If your answer is: because 62^8 (^12, ^16) is much bigger than 36^8 (^12, ^16) then I assume you don't actually know how people crack passwords, which isn't brute-force. If your system is capable of being brute-forced, you already failed, because there's no reason to give someone enough guesses that a brute-force approach succeeds.

That particular detail is not dangerous in and of itself, but it is an embarrassing, public "code smell" because it indicates they are going cowboy mode and implementing weird ideas in their code even when it comes to authentication and cryptography.

Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

#175

Post by ensignavenger »

ghayes wrote: post #108
ensignavenger wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see new banks popping up all the time in the US. I would enjoy seeing a comparison of the process in the US vs the UK.

Do you mean Neobanks that generally attach to existing banks through partnerships? The OCC nearly stopped granting de novo banking charters since 2008: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47014 (see Figure 1 on page 21)

Nah, real banks, but I did some looking and it seems they have state charters rather than national ones from the OCC. What the implications of that would be are rather unclear to me, other than that state banks are regulated by both the state and the FDIC, and national banks are regulated by the OCC.

Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

#176

Post by VikingCoder »

yladiz wrote: post #170

Serious question, and I apologize for the strong language: why should I give a shit about the language a service I consume is written in? Why does it matter it’s in Clojure? I am professionally a Clojure dev so it’s cool to see something written in Clojure like this, but why should I care about that? This is one of the things I really dislike about the community. Yes, Clojure is a powerful language, and I really enjo…

Perhaps you can send them code to execute server-side in a transaction? And so using their API means you have to develop in Clojure, too?

Or they're trying to attract developers to come work for them?

Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

#177

Post by bmelton »

acdha wrote: post #171
yladiz wrote: post #170

Serious question, and I apologize for the strong language: why should I give a shit about the language a service I consume is written in? Why does it matter it’s in Clojure? I am professionally a Clojure dev so it’s cool to see something written in Clojure like this, but why should I care about that? This is one of the things I really dislike about the community. Yes, Clojure is a powerful language, and I really enjo…

Typically it’s most important for languages which haven’t yet hit the level of acceptance that people still worry about being allowed to use them. I remember back in the 90s PHP and Python developers sharing examples like that because it answered business questions like “why aren’t we using Microsoft’s ASP?”

People think of Python as ubiquitous now, but forget how common it used to be for there to be articles titled things like "How to Convince Your Boss that Python is Good For Your Business" on HN and Slashdot back in the day

Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

#178

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

varispeed wrote: post #173
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't my experience. I set up an account with HSBC about seven years go, and they were a nightmare. It took over a month to open the account, and everything had to be done in branch. Also, HSBC in the UK is not the same HSBC in other countries. I once had to fly back to London from Athens just to "pop in to my local branch" for some uninteresting bureaucratic process. I closed that account and switched to Tide.…

As I understand, Tide is not a bank.

That's technically true. Most of their customers have a business account with a different bank under the hood. In my case, I have an e-money account which is safeguarded in line with some regulation, but isn't protected by FSCS.

For my [meagre] business banking intents and purposes, the difference is immaterial, and Tide is a bank.

Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

#179

Post by kemotep »

hanniabu wrote: post #118
kemotep wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will concede the concern that the bank won’t be able to just take your money in the case of using ethereum, but being unable to legally spend your ethereum in the country you physically reside in complicates things. And buying things over the internet would get the government to wonder how you can afford these things and how you will pay your taxes, thus investigating your finances and discovering the proscribed cr…

Yes, let's just give in completely then and give them the ability to freeze any funds they want. That's definitely the logical approach. I gave up with privacy because I can't stay 100% anonymous online against a motivated adversary so now I just install government spyware with root access so they can watch me all the time and control my user accounts!

One can be anti-extrajudicial government powers and anti-cryptocurrency. For one, I believe cryptocurrencies will be the government spyware of the future that allows for total control over our finances, since crypto evangelists push “code is law” and the blockchain is immutable and completely transparent. There will be no privacy in such a system. We could spend our efforts making the current financial system be private and secure instead of doing nothing to fix that problem and utilize a system that gives them even more insight into your finances.

Re: Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure

#180

Post by kiitos »

lifty wrote: post #140
kiitos wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put 100k EUR of Bitcoin into a wallet, but then I lose the private key. There has to be a way for me to recover access to my funds. The only way to do that is to delegate trust to a central authority. Crypto will never, can never, be an alternative to traditional banking for the general population.

You're right, this is a massive weakness in the cryptocurrency space and until this gets better solutions I doubt there will be more mainstream adoption (without centralised custodians). But I will say that this isn't only a problem in the cryptocurrency space, it's a general problem for cryptographic systems. We need better generic systems for managed cryptographic keys, with several levels of backups and recovery o…

I think we already have a pretty good system for managing access to wealth/value, which has several levels of safety, and is relatively low-hassle. I think it's the existing banking infrastructure.
Post reply on HN