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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Would you want a bank to be able to see the balances in an account at another bank? Why? That seems like a security risk (in that that information is much more than is required for the banking system to function).

All you really want to know is "is this check good?" If I write you a check for $4.69, I don't want you or your bank getting access to the fact of my bank balance, just the fact of whether or not my bank will settle that $4.69 check.

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Yeah also that's not how the process of check clearing works (instant account-to-account payments). Banks batch checks payable to the same counterparty institutions and then compare their liabilities against one another to transfer only the net. It's an extension of the historical process where banks would physically go to a clearing house with bundles of paper checks and tally the differences between institutions.

This is a laziness that really shouldn't exist anymore - it solved the problem of jim having to run over to that other bank twenty times a day, but now that jim is just electrons we should send him everywhere instantly.

You say that like writing testing, integrating with existing systems and maintaining the software to do that. The additional hardware. The insurance to cover losses and lawsuits when new system breaks is hacked. All the managers, Lawyers and others needed to craft agreements and contracts between thousands of banks across jurisdictions.

Is free.

Protip, it costs a lot of money. More money than it is worth.

So let's not do it because it's hard? I think it's a ridiculous attitude. It's an instance of where people that have the ability to change things don't have the incentives to do so because they aren't the ones bearing the cost. This is one example where the government could do some good by creating a spec for an instant money transfer system and say that they'll accept it at all government institutions by some time in the future. I think people would then do the rest.

No, it's not do this because it has negative ROI.

Who do you imagine the "us" is, in let's? It's not me and you, nor people in this forum. The banks that have negative financial incentive? The regulators who just caught this guy with the existing system as is and would never win the political battle to roll out this expensive system addressing a rare issue that already is handled? The average powerless citizen? Who will likely never be victim to this.

Calls for pie in the sky actions don't stop being pie in the sky just because they are just, reasonable, "good" for society. We live in a greedy capitalist society. At the society scale. If it's not causing so much problems it can't be ignored or if it doesn't make someone money. It doesn't happen.

You could still use that feature to enumerate how much is in the account by using a series of requests but that would be very easy to spot.

There's no need to know the actual balance, just a boolean value that is returned true if the account balance is above the amount requested, and false if it isn't. It's true that it could be abused by "bruteforce", but this could be throttled or put in a cooldown if too many requests are made to avoid such a scenario.

> All you really want to know is "is this check good?"

There's no way of knowing whether a cheque is good. The banks can always claw back the money from a fraudulent cheque.

There's some scams around that make use of the fact that people think a cleared cheque is a good cheque and that they money is now theirs. That's wrong, it isn't.

Not just a security risk; a securities risk. Banks are forbidden by antitrust and securities laws from some classes of collective trading action, and being able to see each other's account balances openly really skirts that law.

No, but it should be rather trivial to see if the issuing bank has enough on the account balance through an API. Plus the whole money transfer should be near instant, not take days for transfer and months to settle.

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