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Comment by silexia | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens when government runs areas of the economy. Private companies can go bankrupt when they get obsolete, but government agencies have massive political pull and are never dismantled. The nation that can figure out a bankruptcy process for government agencies will be the leader in future centuries.

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Their uptime stats seem pretty reasonable to me, exceeding their target uptime in almost all cases.

https://www.frbservices.org/resources/financial-services/ach...

Am I the only one surprised that some of their targets don't even have 3 nines as availability? That's some pretty crazy stuff when it comes to how serious the context is and considering the availability of cryptocurrency transactions.

Would be interested in seeing the 99.9%ile execution time for BTC vs FedACH transactions. The page linked in the parent comment provides statistics for "timely" processing but doesn't indicate the actual time(s) that that standard represents. My money's still on the Fed though.

> Would be interested in seeing the 99.9%ile execution time for BTC vs FedACH transactions

You mean like account to account transactions? Doesn't ACH transactions take "up to 3 business days" or something silly like that? I can't really find any average numbers either as none of the data is being made public.

The transactions speed for one block in Bitcoin has been at max ~30 minutes, you might require up to N amount of blocks depending on your use case. So 10 blocks (safe) would be 5 hours, available 24/7 (granted you have internet access).

Yes. That'd be quibbling over a few hours per year [1] in availability. No system can be expected to deliver 100% uptime.

I have associates involved in mortgage lending. Anyone who was waiting to close based on a wire was told to just reschedule for tomorrow.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_c...

> That'd be quibbling over a few hours per year

From your own source:

99% ("two nines") - Per Day - 14.40 minutes

99.9% ("three nines") - Per Day - 1.44 minutes

If you do multiple transfers per day, the difference is non negligible. Especially if you rely on it for critical transfers.

> No system can be expected to deliver 100% uptime.

Of course not, hence we're talking about the amount of nines, not if the uptime is perfect.

> Anyone who was waiting to close based on a wire was told to just reschedule for tomorrow.

Indeed, doesn't that suck? Why can't it finish in at least hours if not minutes?

The Federal Reserve is a private company.

It's a private company in name only. It was enacted through congress with a board of directors that are actually a federal government agency. Saying it's a private company is not even technically true.

It's gluing feathers to my iguana and calling it a bird.

Yes, but not really.

It's not surprising how many people aren't aware of that. When you look at the ceremony around the chair and reports to congress, when you read Wikipedia articles, it sounds as if we have a government owned central bank when in fact we have a private entity with distributed and opaque governance which is ostensibly accountable to the congress although I've not seen congress ever act like it has any accountability for fed behavior.

Not true. Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act and assigns to the Board the implementation of it and regulations that are written down in the Code of Federal Regulations. And the Chair is confirmed in the Senate of course.

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