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Aww, you guys are so cute. You think banks have this stuff under control? Auditors will "find" hundreds of millions of dollars of missing assets on the regs. M

Aww, you guys are so cute. You think banks have this stuff under control? Auditors will "find" hundreds of millions of dollars of missing assets on the regs. Many banks are powered by duct tape and loose Excel spreadsheets. That's why things like Basel exist.

rayiner 13y ago
That's really not true. Yes, auditors do find missing assets like that, but some of these banks have trillions in assets. Moreover, these errors usually aren't things like cash in versus cash out. Accounting and tax rules are very complex. So an error might entail having incorrectly computed the value of certain tax assets or the like. More to the point, a major bank will have layers and layers of accounting controls intended to catch even very small errors. These processes are themselves audited every year, and stress tested. It's not duct tape and excel spreadsheets.
srdev 13y ago
Worked at a bank. They have better processes than this. Not gonna say they're perfect, but they can handle balancing their books and not dropping transactions. They certainly don't use a non-ACID PoS like Mongo. Excel was over-used in many places, but was not used for day to day transactions and operations. Yet again, bitcoin apologists inaccurately claim (lie) that banks are actually worse to excuse failings by "their" services.
- remon 13y ago
  Worked at a bank as what? Working at a bank clearly doesn't make someone an expert on their IT infrastructure. The actual financial transaction infrastructure isn't ACID.
  - srdev 13y ago
    As a software developer on corporate credit card applications, dealing with managing transactions, accounts, and restrictions. Our infrastructure was ACID. We certainly wouldn't have used experimental, flaky datastores like Mongo, and shit was not processed using Excel. No-one is an expert on every part of a bank's infrastructure -- its too big for that. But definitely, we had software requirements, as a matter of IT policy, that kept stuff like MongoDB out of production.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - remon 13y ago
      Yeah, so, you don't work on financial infrastructure. That stuff is almost exclusively eventually consistent. And I wasn't arguing that you should use MongoDB or anything else instead. Merely that claims that ACID is the holy grail of financial software is a myth propagated by people that do not know how international financial traffic works.
DanBC 13y ago
> Auditors will "find" Does Coinbase have external auditors?

rayiner 13y ago

That's really not true. Yes, auditors do find missing assets like that, but some of these banks have trillions in assets. Moreover, these errors usually aren't things like cash in versus cash out. Accounting and tax rules are very complex. So an error might entail having incorrectly computed the value of certain tax assets or the like. More to the point, a major bank will have layers and layers of accounting controls intended to catch even very small errors. These processes are themselves audited every year, and stress tested. It's not duct tape and excel spreadsheets.

srdev 13y ago

Worked at a bank. They have better processes than this. Not gonna say they're perfect, but they can handle balancing their books and not dropping transactions. They certainly don't use a non-ACID PoS like Mongo. Excel was over-used in many places, but was not used for day to day transactions and operations. Yet again, bitcoin apologists inaccurately claim (lie) that banks are actually worse to excuse failings by "their" services.

remon 13y ago
Worked at a bank as what? Working at a bank clearly doesn't make someone an expert on their IT infrastructure. The actual financial transaction infrastructure isn't ACID.
- srdev 13y ago
  As a software developer on corporate credit card applications, dealing with managing transactions, accounts, and restrictions. Our infrastructure was ACID. We certainly wouldn't have used experimental, flaky datastores like Mongo, and shit was not processed using Excel. No-one is an expert on every part of a bank's infrastructure -- its too big for that. But definitely, we had software requirements, as a matter of IT policy, that kept stuff like MongoDB out of production.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - remon 13y ago
    Yeah, so, you don't work on financial infrastructure. That stuff is almost exclusively eventually consistent. And I wasn't arguing that you should use MongoDB or anything else instead. Merely that claims that ACID is the holy grail of financial software is a myth propagated by people that do not know how international financial traffic works.

DanBC 13y ago

> Auditors will "find" Does Coinbase have external auditors?