5 ms·
Terrifying to live in a digital economy when something like this happens. You're usually about 1 service away from realising that the "money you have" is just
by dijit 8mo ago
Terrifying to live in a digital economy when something like this happens.
You're usually about 1 service away from realising that the "money you have" is just an int32, that, if everything works properly, you can modify.
Otherwise you have nothing except a pretty little plastic card.
(I'm aware that payments systems are not affected, but it's a sobering realisation that I've had a couple of times, but it works enough of the time that I forget about it... it's a bit like the meme about backups where a computer takes too long to boot, the person slowly builds panic and starts wishing they had backed up and published all their important work - then when the computer works they say "*phew*, thank god I don't have to do any of that".
- davidguetta 8mo agoNow go read about fractional reserve banking
- sinnsro 8mo agoNow that the money is gone What are we supposed to do? After all that we've been through When everything that felt so right is wrong Now that the money is gone (money is gone)
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- p0w3n3d 8mo agoWitnessing this or Texas floods, politicians in my country dare to say that `We don't need cash'
- u1hcw9nx 8mo agoImagine someone "enthusiastically digitized" (as much as possible) in a foreign country alone and then they lose their iPhone Plane tickets, all hotel reservations, they don't remember any phone numbers. They use ApplePay and other mobile payments. Cards may be in the same wallet case. Without a trusted device or Recovery Key, Apple may impose a security delay (24 hours to several days) before allowing a password reset. Getting new SIM and re-authenticating our life will be pain.
- ivan_gammel 8mo agoTemporarily losing access is just inconvenience. Imagine the same but you lost the wallet with your only cash and your passport in pre-digital times, you are far from the nearest embassy and nobody understands your language. You are fully at the mercy of the locals and your money aren‘t coming back.
- loloquwowndueo 8mo agoA wallet is a wonderful invention that allows you to lose all your important items in one fell swoop
- M95D 8mo agoI keep ID+money separate from passport+cards.
- u1hcw9nx 8mo agoWith Digital passports and ID's the route to recovery starts to get hairy. 1. You need to verify yourself in person to get id or passport. You may need someone you know with you and have real interview. 3. But government gives only digital ID's so you need a phone to get it. 4. You can't buy a new phone or get a new SIM unless you can pay for it. You can't pay for it unless you have a phone and credit cards there. But neither bank does not recognize you without digital ID. You need friends to bootstrap your life, but you are also in the middle of loneliness epidemic and have no friends, you parents have died. What do you do?
- nicoburns 8mo ago> the "money you have" is just an int32 If only it was a uint32
- doublerabbit 8mo agoMy money is a boolean at this point. money_in_account=false;
- M95D 8mo agoStill better than half of uint32 possibilities.
- Brian_K_White 8mo agoWanna take another stab at that? :)
- M95D 8mo agoLol, I just wrote a bug.
- chii 8mo ago> that the "money you have" is just an int32 well, luckily, that's not how money is stored, but instead, they're transaction based. Aka, that number you have is a calculated value, not a stored, arbitrary value. Except...perhaps the central bank's, where they could really just generate that money as an arbitrary value to lend out to other banks. footnote: of course, your account balance is cached, so that it is not recalculated over and over again...
- TonyStr 8mo agoDo you know of any resources where I can read about how banks store digital currency? Would be interesting to see how international transactions are handled, if they chunk data into months/periods, etc.
- filcuk 8mo agoI can't say this is exactly what you're after, but this article is really interesting https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html Similar to what the author describes, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this information is generally not public.
- delusional 8mo agoI'm a banker. What you're looking for here is called "interbank clearing". In europe that would be SEPA[1] But yes, most clearing is done daily. Each bank basically submits their daily flow of money to each other participating bank, and the central ACH (Automated Clearing House) keeps track of the balances. There's some processes in there by which banks can dispute charges, which is super interesting, but also way to complicated for me to detail here. [1]: https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/epc-payment-scheme-management/clearing-and-settlement-mechanisms https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/epc-paymen...
- wildylion 8mo agoSide question, but what happens if there's a technical error with the service provider that leads to double spending? Example: we bought tickets worth 300 EUR from Deutsche Bahn, they were hit by a DDoS and couldn't complete the transaction. We got charged *twice* (i.e. 600 EUR and not refunded yet. AND no tickets!!! Now they claim all they can do is to give us 600 EUR in vouchers (that are not even transferrable). Would a Chargeback work in this case? And my friend (who's ordered the tickets) has a very traditional bank that only gives a statement monthly, and probably accepts claims on every 29 of February, between 7 and 8 AM and only by fax (IYKYK those German companies...)
- eesmith 8mo ago"just an int32" I remember hearing that Zimbabwe, during its period of hyperinflation, had problems because the databases for the banking system couldn't handle a time with $100 trillion banknotes, and ATMs didn't work because of overflow errors. If only they had used int128. :)
- boobsbr 8mo agoNot an int32, but a BigDecimal.
- zvqcMMV6Zcr 8mo agoIsn't it handled by COBOL or some other ancient language that only supports strings?
- boobsbr 8mo agoIt's Struts 1.0 running on J2EE 1.5 hosted on WebSphere which does the talking to COBOL. COBOL serializes everything to strings in a flat file. We're currently planning on migrating the flat files to a Sybase DB.
- dzhiurgis 8mo agoGiven reliability and security of payment systems - simple credit card (chip/nfc) should be enough for identity. You could pull off entire election using payment terminals.
- surgical_fire 8mo agoIs it in anyway worse when the money you had was some strips of paper, or metal coins, or goats, or salt? All of those have some very annoying fail scenarios too.
- dijit 8mo agoyeah, it's worse. Someone trips over a cable and now your region of the world can't recognise that you have any wealth of any kind. Or, you can get debanked by the state. :) Hard to do that with coinage- but you can have your coinage destroyed in a fire (or via theft, of course).
- surgical_fire 8mo agoI respectfully disagree, but each with their own personal annoyances. Strips of paper and metal coins have a huge problem with forgery. Metal coins in particular can get very heavy very quickly. Goats have this issue that they can get sick and die. They also need to be fed. Goats have a massive advantage that while heavy, they can move around on their own. Not easily fractionable though. Salt is probably the best one in that list. Easily fractionable, not easy to forge. Can be used as seasoning and to dry things. It can get wet though.
- dijit 8mo agoYou can disagree, that's fine. But anything you can touch has the risk of being forged or destroyed. The whole point of bank notes was that they're centrally backed- someone would take the responsibility of ensuring that it's hard to forge and backed by something "real". But centralising it so completely has pretty concrete drawbacks, which is fine, if your infrastructure is perfectly reliable and your banks are trustworthy. History has shown us that infrastructure is never perfect, and banks are not perfectly trustworthy. So, hedge your own risks. A personal tragedy (losing some money) is materially different than the entire economy being screwed because of a programming issue, or a city being screwed because of an internet outage, or a person and their family being (additionally) screwed because they offended a politician. It's just.. different levels, and the centralised convenience becomes a pretty catastrophic impact in the worst case; and on a long enough timeline, the worst case is inevitable.
- ksimukka 8mo agoMore like a float with a precision of 18. Most of us who work in payment systems care a lot about precision and reliability.
- parl_match 8mo agoOkay... but a float? High precision sounds great but uh... got a lot of issues. If you know what I mean.
- silisili 8mo agoNot in payments... but I thought I've read many times payment systems specifically do -not- use floats, more often integers with a known/predetermined denominator. Is that roughly accurate?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ge96 8mo agoWas at a checkout the other day, forgot my wallet in my bag, thoughts went through my mind: tap to pay? (not setup), crypto? (need USD, tap to pay). Had bad internet in that one spot, faster to run outside to my car and get my wallet.
- neya 8mo ago> "money you have" is just an int32 Damn, that's terrifyingly eye opening. That's a really, really strong argument for physical cash (or gold maybe?)
- throwmitid1234 8mo agoPayments were affected somewhat. In Denmark it is often required to sign in to MitID when doing online transactions using credit/debit cards, it is called 3D Secure. You usually have other options. MobilePay, PayPal, the likes.
- Kate5477 8mo ago[dead]