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ACH is free to the user, convenient, safe, well understood, and the energy requirements aren't insane. Any banks foolish enough to process cryptocurrency trans

by nwah1 6y ago

ACH is free to the user, convenient, safe, well understood, and the energy requirements aren't insane. Any banks foolish enough to process cryptocurrency transactions will have to meet all the same banking requirements for anti-moneylaundering, anti-terrorism, rogue states, etc. These sort of requirements are part of the reason for delays. International transactions can also get delayed because of shoddy foreign banking servers which may simply be down. All of these problems remain, but an additional constraint of requiring consensus and hashing is imposed. This is a version of second system syndrome where even the naive variant doesn't sound good on paper.

reilly3000 6y ago
Agreed that crypto and banking seem like oil and water for the issues you mentioned. ACH is far from safe. The keys are printed on every check, the transactions aren't reversible, the settlement times are practically untenable for business. I've sold and bought payroll services, charged my customers with ACH, paid vendors with ACH, read the gawdawful spec, and I haven't much good to say about it, other than it mostly works, and enough people know it well enough.
- reilly3000 6y ago
  Further reading for the curious: The official rules: https://www.firstmid.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/2013-Corporate-Rules-and-Guidelines.pdf https://www.firstmid.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/2013-Cor... https://files.nc.gov/ncosc/documents/eCommerce/bank_of_america_nacha_file_specs.pdf https://files.nc.gov/ncosc/documents/eCommerce/bank_of_ameri... This is the cleanest implementation guide I've ever seen. Its a breeze compared to the former. Fraud issues: https://bankinnovation.net/allposts/focus/comp-reg/ach-is-a-sieve-of-fraud-that-needs-to-be-fixed/ https://bankinnovation.net/allposts/focus/comp-reg/ach-is-a-... A dev's take: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/85046/what-protections-are-put-in-place-to-prevent-ach-scams https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/85046/what-prot... > Note that ACH was never designed to fullfil the task it's currently used for.

by nwah1 6y ago

reilly3000 6y ago

Agreed that crypto and banking seem like oil and water for the issues you mentioned. ACH is far from safe. The keys are printed on every check, the transactions aren't reversible, the settlement times are practically untenable for business. I've sold and bought payroll services, charged my customers with ACH, paid vendors with ACH, read the gawdawful spec, and I haven't much good to say about it, other than it mostly works, and enough people know it well enough.

reilly3000 6y ago
Further reading for the curious: The official rules: https://www.firstmid.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/2013-Corporate-Rules-and-Guidelines.pdf https://www.firstmid.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/2013-Cor... https://files.nc.gov/ncosc/documents/eCommerce/bank_of_america_nacha_file_specs.pdf https://files.nc.gov/ncosc/documents/eCommerce/bank_of_ameri... This is the cleanest implementation guide I've ever seen. Its a breeze compared to the former. Fraud issues: https://bankinnovation.net/allposts/focus/comp-reg/ach-is-a-sieve-of-fraud-that-needs-to-be-fixed/ https://bankinnovation.net/allposts/focus/comp-reg/ach-is-a-... A dev's take: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/85046/what-protections-are-put-in-place-to-prevent-ach-scams https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/85046/what-prot... > Note that ACH was never designed to fullfil the task it's currently used for.