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I really do not understand how it is possible to run a system size of MtGox without some kind of reconciliation. You have a written record of how many bitcoins

I really do not understand how it is possible to run a system size of MtGox without some kind of reconciliation. You have a written record of how many bitcoins came in, were traded, and went out. Let's say you could not detect if transaction was successful or not, you still should have been able to detect that you are missing some bitcoins relatively quickly.

wpietri 13y ago
There is a story about the country hick who comes to the big city and gets a checking account. A couple weeks later, the bank manager call him up to tell him that he has overdrawn his account, that he has no more money. "That's impossible!" says the rube. "I still have 3 checks left!" Too many programmers are woefully ignorant of how to write systems that handle money. Too often I have seen systems that treat money as floats, or have primitives that allow the creation and destruction of money. Accounting and banking have their own special set of rituals. I think most programmers can understand this if they think about it a bit. Think about the lower quartile of coders [1] you know jumping in and writing a system to handle many kinds of money, including a novel kind that is poorly understood. Now put them under conditions of massive growth, conditions in which there is a shit-ton of money, fiat and crypto, arriving and departing in buckets. I once saw a cartoon where a bank teller is saying to a worried-looking customer, "I'm sorry sir, there's not enough money in your account. Let me see if there's enough in somebody else's." I could easily believe that's what happened, here, the Dunning-Kruger effect writ large. [1] I have no knowledge about MtGox's developers; this is just a though exercise.
robzyb 13y ago
> I really do not understand how it is possible to run a system size of MtGox without some kind of reconciliation. It's very easy. It's actually easier than doing a reconciliation. Its quite possible that MTGox thought "everything has to balance, because we're only giving out money that people have deposited, therefore what would be the point of a reconciliation?"

wpietri 13y ago

There is a story about the country hick who comes to the big city and gets a checking account. A couple weeks later, the bank manager call him up to tell him that he has overdrawn his account, that he has no more money. "That's impossible!" says the rube. "I still have 3 checks left!" Too many programmers are woefully ignorant of how to write systems that handle money. Too often I have seen systems that treat money as floats, or have primitives that allow the creation and destruction of money. Accounting and banking have their own special set of rituals. I think most programmers can understand this if they think about it a bit. Think about the lower quartile of coders [1] you know jumping in and writing a system to handle many kinds of money, including a novel kind that is poorly understood. Now put them under conditions of massive growth, conditions in which there is a shit-ton of money, fiat and crypto, arriving and departing in buckets. I once saw a cartoon where a bank teller is saying to a worried-looking customer, "I'm sorry sir, there's not enough money in your account. Let me see if there's enough in somebody else's." I could easily believe that's what happened, here, the Dunning-Kruger effect writ large. [1] I have no knowledge about MtGox's developers; this is just a though exercise.

robzyb 13y ago

> I really do not understand how it is possible to run a system size of MtGox without some kind of reconciliation. It's very easy. It's actually easier than doing a reconciliation. Its quite possible that MTGox thought "everything has to balance, because we're only giving out money that people have deposited, therefore what would be the point of a reconciliation?"