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How does money go missing? Ive been reading about money in a database and it seems pretty straight forward. Each transaction has an ID and a user ID, how does

• sanderjd 8y ago
  On the one hand, it's hard to scale a system without making it distributed at some point and consistency in distributed systems is really difficult; the system Coinbase is running is definitely not as straight forward as whatever you've been reading about. On the other hand, this is their core competency and it is absolutely not acceptable for money to go missing; it's a tough problem but its their business and they have to make it work or they're in for major trouble.
  • 394549 8y ago
    > On the one hand, it's hard to scale a system without making it distributed at some point and consistency in distributed systems is really difficult Banks have scaled systems like this with mainframes and COBOL for decades. It's probably not as hard as you think to get it right if you have your priorities straight. IMHO, for banking, you need to KISS and avoid all unnecessary complexity (especially in the name of "scale"), at least for your master source of truth.