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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

What I really want this payment system to do is eliminate the direct debit system from checking accounts and return some real security to banking. Secure, irrevocable payments, only initiated by me, from my account to others.

No more system that allows mistake debits or others to accidentally/maliciously deduct from my checking account, such that I have to be watching for errors and ask for them to be fixed. Or wondering if someone's payment to me might be reversed. Or having my (or your) parents fall victim to an advance fee scam with bounced checks 2 weeks after deposit. Ridiculous.

It's well past time for this. Or at least now give me the choice to have those loopholes eliminated from my checking account.

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There will be banks that offer products for handling pulls differently, it's a product decision, various features around this are available for the big boys, just haven't trickled down to the masses. But this decade they will. Has nothing to do with Fed Now.

Irrevocability- for consumer payments there will always be revocability. Humans doing stuff make mistakes, and need to be able to "take it back." At the ledger level, all transactions are irrevocable. You apply other transactions on top to implement recovability.

Irrevocability- for consumer payments there will always be revocability.

And yet, if you go into a store and buy something with cash, you have never been able to just arbitrarily reverse that payment and keep the goods several months later, and the sky has not fallen.

Humans doing stuff make mistakes, and need to be able to "take it back."

And what about the humans who didn't make a mistake, but simply chose to abuse the system at the expense of whoever they transferred the money to? Certainty and security are important for those on both sides of a transaction. If you have a dispute, that's what legal systems are there for. The quasi-judicial role that financial services play in resolving disputes, often with little regulatory oversight and absolutely no requirement to be neutral or objective, is long overdue for retirement.

Scale is relevant. It’s why people don’t typically make down payments on houses with sacks of nickles.

And why people don’t wire funds to buy a bag of snackums.

> The quasi-judicial role that financial services play in resolving disputes, often with little regulatory oversight and absolutely no requirement to be neutral or objective, is long overdue for retirement.

I would bet that the Fed views this as a feature, not a bug. Regardless of your (and mine or their) beliefs on that matter, I would hope you see why they might choose a measure of progress in payment clearance and disassociate the two goals. I imagine the Fed fully knows it plays the role of a rather strong glue within the broader global financial system, and could just as easily throw on another layer of binding to require irrevocable payments by sheer fiat if they chose, regardless of the technical implementations of bank payment clearance.

Honestly, from what I've heard of the US Court system, I'd much rather have the least competent bank in the country deal with my disputes than have to go through the courts. Slow, expensive, and also unjust.

I'm also under the impression that this would be a tightly regulated area but I don't know for sure.

This sounds like Bitcoin.

What? How?

>No more system that allows mistake debits or others to accidentally/maliciously deduct from my checking account, such that I have to be watching for errors

Sure, with bitcoin you can't get charged maliciously (if you don't get your keys stolen) or get hit by a chargeback but... i can't think of any financial system that's less error tolerant and that requires more attention to errors. What he describes has nothing to do with bitcoin, at all.

The difference is that you have to watch that you don't make the errors, not other people.

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