Comment by dijit
2 days 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".
Imagine 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.
Temporarily 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.
With 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?
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A wallet is a wonderful invention that allows you to lose all your important items in one fell swoop
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I just have one paper passport, the only passport that will be accepted abroad.
What's the difference to losing your backpack containing all these separate items? And conversely, it's very possible to carry a recovery Yubikey, a single-use login code etc. in a separate bag.
Getting a new (e)SIM abroad can be very annoying, depending on the mobile network, which is why I try to avoid mandatory SMS authentication as much as possible.
Yeah losing is maybe a bad example. What about a software update bricking the device, or a hardware problem?
What's the difference to losing your backpack containing all these separate items?
Nobody ever lost everything by dropping a backpack in a public toilet.
A phone, on the other hand…
> the "money you have" is just an int32
If only it was a uint32
My money is a boolean at this point.
Still better than half of uint32 possibilities.
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> 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...
Alas, no matter how the bits that makes up my bank balance looks, in practice its still a single point of failure where I might simply lose access to my money if the right service is down. Cash has much better uptime stats, even if it can be inconvenient to carry around.
Do 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.
I can't say this is exactly what you're after, but this article is really interesting 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.
I'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-paymen...
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Regular banks create new money all the time (loans). There’s no difference to the central bank conceptually as far as I understand, they both record debits/credits to accounts (double entry).
Ah yes, who needs the Federal Reserve when you have Kansas' own Emprise Bank.
Seems like a distinction without difference in this context. The result of the "what is account x's current/available balance" is still some integer or decimal number.
But the GP implied that the bank (or someone) could just alter that number, and it would become reality.
I'm saying that this can't be done - at least, not without leaving such a large trail behind that it would be easily reverted, and relevant people prosecuted.
> well, luckily, that's not how money is stored, but instead, they're transaction based.
Not really. That's how the accounting works. It's the gold standard, and what we guarantee our customers, it's not universally how we store it though. Plenty of bank systems store just singular balances and infer that back into "transactions" in other systems to make the balance even out. Then the errors in those balances are manually corrected by looking at the sums.
IT systems only rarely match the legal frameworks they operate within.
Witnessing this or Texas floods, politicians in my country dare to say that `We don't need cash'
Payments 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.
Was 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.
> "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?)
"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. :)
More like a float with a precision of 18.
Most of us who work in payment systems care a lot about precision and reliability.
Not 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?
Okay... but a float? High precision sounds great but uh... got a lot of issues. If you know what I mean.
Now go read about fractional reserve banking
Now 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)
Not an int32, but a BigDecimal.
Isn't it handled by COBOL or some other ancient language that only supports strings?
It'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.
Is 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.
yeah, 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).
I 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.
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Given 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.