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FedNow Is Live

federalreserve.gov

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Re: FedNow Is Live

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two points of context: * the Biden administration is planning to monitor smaller denomination transactions (in an inflationary environment!) * IRS resources historically and presently target low-income, low-wealth households/individuals for audits https://www.cnbc.com/select/irs-600-reporting-rule-delayed/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-audit-eitc-five-times-as-li...

What benefit would targeting low wealth individuals have to the IRS? I worked on a state tax system briefly at Accenture and they offered the product for a percentage of reclaimed taxes. They started with high debts with good credit scores. Since they had skin in the game (which it could be argued the IRS doesn’t), they wanted to maximize the unpaid taxes they collected.

> What benefit would targeting low wealth individuals have to the IRS?

Wrong question. The correct question is:

What benefit would the IRS targetting low wealth individuals have to high wealth individuals?

Re: FedNow Is Live

#472
post #453
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you're both in NYC it should be fine. At the very least T + ping time + 1 ms And this should be available to customer investors (dudes at home) before retail investors (hedge funds)

"retail investors" normally refers to individuals at home and T+2 doesn't affect them because they have margin accounts. The only limitation is that if you day trade, you'll need $25k in your margin account. If you don't day trade or you have $25k, you can withdraw $0.01 a few milliseconds after selling $0.01 in shares

Personally I use the word "retail" to refer to restaurants, stores, malls, and other soulless things that occupy commercial real estate.

I use "customers" to refer to souls that occupy residential real estate.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#473
post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash isn't recordable in the same way. I don't provide my id with the transaction when making cash purchases.

I don't think this service is replacing cash payments unless I am missing something?

You are correct. I was thinking cdbc not fednow.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#474

For those curious, it is really using IBM MQ[1] under the hood and uses a bespoke flavor of the ISO 20022 specification. The FedNow Service itself is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what actually happens from an end-to-end perspective. We've been working to become a Certified Service Provider so feel free to ask me anything. I'm happy to share anything that is not under NDA. [1] https://www.ibm.com/products/mq

Is the eventual end-game that I can send money from my account at Bank A, to a friend's account at Bank B to split a check at dinner without using a third party like Venmo?

Not OP, but I thought FedNow will do this on day one for participating banks. Someone correct me if I’m wrong. FedNow will also settle faster than Venmo currently does (unless you pay for Venmo’s instant settlement) because it’s instantaneous. To be fair to Venmo, their bottleneck was precisely the lack of FedNow. I assume Venmo will make instant settlement free. But they will need to add more features now that people might substitute with FedNow. Anyway, this is a big deal for Americans and was a long time coming.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#475
post #376

For those curious, it is really using IBM MQ[1] under the hood and uses a bespoke flavor of the ISO 20022 specification. The FedNow Service itself is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what actually happens from an end-to-end perspective. We've been working to become a Certified Service Provider so feel free to ask me anything. I'm happy to share anything that is not under NDA. [1] https://www.ibm.com/products/mq

> I'm happy to share anything that is not under NDA. Meta-questions that you quite possibly can't answer: broadly speaking, what parts of this system are under NDA? Why would any part of this system be under NDA? Did any government agencies impose the NDA, or was it private companies? Is the NDA intended to protect those running the system, or is it intended to protect those using the system (IOW, is it security by o…

In my line of US government coding (no relationship with this project), NDA is orthogonal to security. NDA is used to protect confidential vendor information. For example: that they have a contract with the government at all (in the case of a stealth startup), specific technical capabilities they don’t want broadcast to their competitors, the size of the contract vs. committed resources, etc

Re: FedNow Is Live

#476
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can buy an icecream anywhere in the world without anybody tracking me. No you can't. Companies like OpenEye and Deep Sentinel offer facial recognition solutions that are targeted at loss-prevention, and these systems are commonplace in the USA. Facial recognition-based consumer analytics systems are also available. In fact, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a pint of ice cream that you can buy without having…

So because malicious parties can track us via other means, we should just allow them to start doing it (even more) through our financial history? Anyways, it's not (fully) about information sharing. It's about control. It's the difference between read access and read/write access.

FedNow doesn't allow any more or less tracking than what's already possible through the Fed's visibility into ACH. So for the purposes of FedNow the entire conversation is off-topic.

Anyways, you missed the point.

The anti-new-technology and anti-gov-technology response to privacy and control is misguided. Corporations will fuck you, left unchecked, and governments will fuck you through corporations. There is no technical solution to political problems, and physical cash vs FedNow vs digital currency is a suite of technical solutions.

Trying to solve a political problem by eliminating technology is literally the same thing as trying to solve political problems with technology. The fallacy is in focusing on technology where the actual problem is political.

The problem is political and needs to be treated as such. The solution is building and maintaining political consensus in favor of strong privacy and personal property rights, not carrying around a billfold full of physical cash.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#477
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently this works between banks only. Banks have reserves at the Fed, and those reserves are what gets adjusted when a FedNow transaction happens. The banks then adjust their own records on their customers' behalf.

It won't take long before all banks are using it. Once the banks are using it, employers will begin making payments using it. Once employees are receiving digital currency payments from employers, cash will end soon after.

If it does end, Amazon gift vouchers? What would be a better substitute?

Re: FedNow Is Live

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, it's going to let the government see every transaction you make Can you go into more detail here on what you think will change from the status quo? Existing bank transfers are obviously not secret from the government on request. While the government doesn't have direct access to run search heuristics on the whole dataset they just delegate that to the banks' internal compliance team.

If the government wants to tax these transactions - and let's admit it, they do - they'll take it right off the top. Unlike with the banking system where different banks have different prices for wires - or even free under certain conditions - you can't "shop around" for a new government. Further, if a government determines you are not an "acceptable" participant, they have the ability to stop transactions to/from yo…

> If the government wants to tax these transactions - and let's admit it, they do - they'll take it right off the top.

They have no authority to do this unless you're subject to a tax witholding order. The government cannot collect taxes on arbitrary transactions as they occur - it can levy taxes, and then attempt to collect them (it hopes via voluntary payment by taxpayers).

You, like so many other commenters here, seem to fail to grasp that FedNow is a replacement for ACH, the existing inter-bank exchange system that already involves the Federal Reserve to precisely the same extent that ACH already does.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#479
post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the very least, one would hope that credentials and perhaps also certain design documents such as threat models aren't public. There may also be implementation details or code which are subject to NDA, either from the Fed itself or from service providers such as IBM in this case. Sometimes you can get that info from a FOIA request, but that doesn't negate the fact that the employees working on the system are bound…

I'm not sure "don't give out the private keys" is the sort of thing that needs a special contractual agreement.

That is exactly that kind of thing that needs to be in a contract. When someone inevitably shares private keys and it results in some kind of financial loss ... who is responsible for the damages? Contracts codify the liability if it isn't otherwise defined by statute.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#480
Is there a way to restrict my bank to only allow incoming deposits to use this for my account? I'm scared of VULNs in a new system being abused to withdraw money quickly. Yes, I know the bank is on the hook for making me whole, but recovering from a financial issue like that is more annoying and time consuming than just avoiding it and being a late adopter.
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