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Comment by kjellsbells | Hacker News Reader

There are many, but perhaps the second part of your question is invisible, but is the meaningful one: "in a short timeframe" or "at reasonable cost" or something.

People like to dump on government but they can move the acceptable window/best practice to a place that corps would not have gotten to by themselves. Crypto is one, OWASP springs to mind, etc. But the government is not a homogeneous monolithic entity and it necessarily has to have some confliction built into it. You could have a bulletproof secure system for identity for example come out of NIST, say,...but the CIA would immediately need a workaround so that agents could assume new IDs in the field.

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I think there is a good argument to be made that many companies would have created a better infrastructure by now if the government wasn't involved.

Yeah, like moving to IPv6 in a small time frame.

People arguing about public vs. private are missing the mark entirely. It has nothing to do with that. It's all about how many people have to do a task.

The US govt got to the moon and created a nuclear bomb in a relatively tiny amount of time, all entirely because it was a relatively small number of people focused on the same task. As for people who own routers? Thousands and thousands of them who all have different interests who aren't all focused on the same goal.

Getting a large group of people to do one simple task is 100x harder than getting a small group of people to do a complex task. This is why humanity got to the moon but still are stuck on IPv4.

The moon and the bomb are both examples of what happens when you take aim at a problem with completely unlimited money and zero red tape. 400,000 people contributed to the moon landing and the Manhattan Project employed over 130,000 people. These were not small groups.

I think the fact that most of the world has decent payment systems (eg UK FPS) now due to government mandates, where the US notably does not, is a decent counterpoint.

worth noting that the Federal Reserve has gradually started up programs that now basically handle all the different types of inter bank transfers in the US.

Those programs have now out competed every corporate service in the space and are either the main clearing house/provider or the second main provider in each type of US bank transfer.

They now have FedNow which is a "next gen" for these types of transfer systems and over the course of the next few years to the next decade it'll probably eat all the other systems as well as the many corporate offerings as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedwire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedACH

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow

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