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by perfect_kiss 1125 days ago
Yep, with closed-source financial applications such issues are a common thing, just on a smaller scale so they do not meet the news.

Many of contemporary financials are also still being worked on the mainframes, utilizing the technology stack of 80s, and there are many differences between vendor implementations in the space.

While there are many argues about usability of crypto for payments today, crypto standards do exist in form of RFCs that are open source, produced by community, and are enforced world wide by application developers.

Very progressive step forward IMO as compared to software side of traditional finance today.

2 comments

Sorry but this is such a bad take. Many of the bigger banks and financial institutions have very mature and well architected tech stacks, as do many newer fintechs. They have the funding to hire some of the best engineers, and they do. Being open has advantages, yes, but it's not inherently better.

There have been plenty of bugs and vulnerabilities in blockchain technologies over the years.

Thanks for discussion.

The mature and well architected tech stacks in traditional finance come from the economy of the scale, from where also comes funding as you metioned. Crypto currently has the blockspace problem which prevents from scalability. So, while there are some well performing companies in crypto (dozens of them), there are much more companies in traditional finance, just because of scale.

The problem of blockspace have been solved in smaller networks with use of sharding, and will be rolled out to bigger networks in form of upgrades. If the world does not see regulation uproar banning crypto everywhere in coming years, crypto will endure true economies of scale. Think every PoS app, every B2B payment gateway, every web application in the wild accepting both Visa and crypto based payments, with crypto fee -- and price -- being less. I don't see how traditional finance can withstand this challenge. IMO this is also like BBS forums vs. Web technologies in 90s. I say it as someone who worked on parsing and producing Mastercard related file formats, and also worked on enterprise crypto applications. While I agree right now the crypto is laughable from many aspects, so it was the web in it's early years.

Yes, crypto is definitely not the solution to this. This was a transient problem, that was resolved within the week. Everyone got paid back. An issue with the EVM overcharging people is irreversible. Those funds would be lost for good. At least with trad-fi, you can click a few buttons and revert payments.
There are so many levels of irony in this comment