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If a tree falls in the forest... "the money never left the account" is not really the way to think of this. The bank does not move around piles of cash when yo

If a tree falls in the forest... "the money never left the account" is not really the way to think of this. The bank does not move around piles of cash when you withdraw money, or keep some gold set aside in a vault for your use. "The account" is the amount of money that the bank attributes to you when it is drawn upon. Basically, I think you are mixing up cause and effect. The log of debits and credits is the account. The balance is some derived number that represents all of the cleared transactions in the account. It is useful because it determines policy around your account (how much interest to give, how much to let you withdraw from an ATM), but it's not the fundamental building block of banking.

Confusion 14y ago
"The account" is the amount of money that the bank attributes to you when it is drawn upon. Yes. And the scenario I propose is that your bank statement says you withdrew an amount and later regained that amount, while in the intermediate time the actual amount attributed to you by the bank was always the original amount. If a significant other was withdrawing from the same account at the same time, it may have been possible to overdraw beyond the usual limit. As long as that would eventually come to light, due to eventual consistency, that's not a problem (and undoubtedly something you contractually agreed to take as a risk). Transactional algorithms usually require logging to be able to recover from failures. A conclusion of the recovery process can be that certain actions did not take place. A bank statement is a rather sparse log that underspecifies what actually happened.