Earlier quoted context omitted.
I presume the system uses bank account and routing numbers? So besides concerns with sharing that information with the public, concerned citizens will figure out who they bank with, and will most likely be able to easily pressure the bank to drop them. Certain things should be difficult to accomplish in a functional society anyways, and administering a profitable hate group is one of those things. If not bankrupted b…
I'm sure British loyalists circa 1776 would have agreed with you.
FedNow Is Live
551–560 of 1001 posts
Re: FedNow Is Live
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
A discussion forum similar to, say, Something Awful (or indeed HN), with a focus on mocking online misbehaviour and a reputation for unpopular political views.
>with a focus on mocking online misbehaviour and a reputation for unpopular political views. A less generous interpretation is that they coordinate harassment campaigns against transgender people and have caused at least three suicides.
Re: FedNow Is Live
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are still almost 5k banks in the US. Unlike Zelle, if this opens to all of them, all you need is one bank.
I presume the system uses bank account and routing numbers? So besides concerns with sharing that information with the public, concerned citizens will figure out who they bank with, and will most likely be able to easily pressure the bank to drop them. Certain things should be difficult to accomplish in a functional society anyways, and administering a profitable hate group is one of those things. If not bankrupted b…
Which is how this sort of thing ought to be handled, in stark contrast to "Chrystia Freeland sends an email to the heads of major banks to get troublemakers debanked with zero transparency or due process."
Re: FedNow Is Live
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think KiwiFarms is a cesspool and I think Null in particular is an extremely crappy human, but despite that I disagreed with the credit card processors pulling them, because they really did have a near-monopoly for online payments, meaning that this could be considered stifling of free speech. However, I think I'll have less of an issue for it if there's the government-backed means in which to send them money; at t…
This is a dramatic whitewashing of KiwiFarms. KiwiFarms was not deplatformed for wrongthink or because people disagreed with their ideas. They were deplatformed for coordinating harassment campaigns that resulted in at least three confirmed suicides. That is not protected speech.
I dislike that site and the general behavior of its users too, obviously, but during that time when it was in the spotlight I saw plenty of evidence of egregious behavior and blatant lies from people campaigning to censor them, and much of it seemed to work. It's not hard to see how debanking could affect less "problematic" organizations or individuals through censorship campaigns (or government interference) regardless of your feelings about KF itself.
Re: FedNow Is Live
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I had to read this twice - is it really not like in the UK? Is this the first US implementation of "Faster Payments"? Sure people in the UK sometimes use PayPal, Revolut, but most of the time its always just a friend gives (and you save on your banking app) their bank account number and sort code, and you instantly send it across. edit: with no fee
I had no idea it was the opposite in the UK.
Edit: with the exception of writing physical checks, of course. I use those when the receiver doesn’t accept Venmo or Apple Pay.
Re: FedNow Is Live
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
A discussion forum similar to, say, Something Awful (or indeed HN), with a focus on mocking online misbehaviour and a reputation for unpopular political views.
>with a focus on mocking online misbehaviour and a reputation for unpopular political views. A less generous interpretation is that they coordinate harassment campaigns against transgender people and have caused at least three suicides.
Re: FedNow Is Live
#557It will be interesting to see how this affects "toxic," deplatformed, and to some degree debanked (at least from PayPal and CC processors) entities, like the KiwiFarms. While this page is somewhat vague about the private/public status of the Fed: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm it seems pretty well established that federally chartered corporations, like the USPS and Amtrak (e.g., https://en.wikipe…
Isn't it the case that you still have to have a relationship with a bank to have an account to transfer into or out of via FedNow in the first place? In that case I don't think this would change the picture at all. It's not the intention to help the unbanked pariahs, that's for sure.
I don't want my banks to know who I send money to via Zelle; but they do. If banks are happy with customers writing checks to 'problematic' people, why they think that frequent Zelle activity as source of risk, as long as customers are not depositing or withdrawing cash/money orders.
Re: FedNow Is Live
#558Earlier 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…
> threat models This is exactly the thing you _shouldn't_ put under NDA. What on earth?
Re: FedNow Is Live
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there anything special about the IBM MQ implementation which makes it worth naming them? It looks like you can connect to it using AMQP so I wonder why they wouldn't just say something generic like "MQ" or "AMQP protocol".
Last time, a decade ago, I played with RabbitMQ and similar open source queue system they didn't handle congestion and rate limitation well (crashed). From my little experience with classical IBM systems like MQ they knew about that stuff.
As far as message queues go for something like the federal reserve, IBM MQ is really the only option that wouldn't raise a lot of eyebrows in the industry. The Fed is not the kind of institution that I think people would be lenient on for being open and innovative with their software solutions, banks really need to know that this thing is going to work and they all run IBM MQ themselves already. Not to mention the integration possibilities with Db2 and IMS, which are both huge in finance.
My only complaint is that it is very expensive. That's the story with most of the kind of hardcore technical products IBM sells that are likely to wind up near mainframes. I'd imagine the Fed gets a sizeable discount though.
Re: FedNow Is Live
#560I don't understand why FedNow and CBDC are such a big issue in the US. FedNow looks quite attractive from a fees perspective, especially when compared to PayPal and alike. Part of me wonders if the middlemen who stand to lose out might be trying to muddy the waters. It wouldn't be the first time.
The same thing happens when a town decides to string fiber on their utility poles and sell transit. All sorts of reasons why that's a terrible thing. Same for importing drugs from other countries. And on and on.
I dream of the day my municipality does this. The idea of buying service from whoever I want rather than be forced to use Comcast... -swoon-