[dijit]

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".

[u1hcw9nx]

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.

[ivan_gammel]

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.

[u1hcw9nx]

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?

[Muromec]

You are overthinking it. The physical cards to pay and identify yourself are not going anywhere. In fact, the same places that have the digital id rolled out are the places where having one issued is mandatory and often times it's also mandatory to have one in case the police asks you to identify yourself.

When I wanted to get a replacement id to be issued in the year 2019, I had to book an appointment, get to the place and by the time I got the desk, the clerk had the thing open with my face photo from the last time I had a passport issued.

There are less fortunate people, who have the hardcopy id present, but no digital file exists for it (because it was issued before the digital files became a thing) and the paper trail leads to the occupied territory. That is usually months long story where secondary sources are involved and sometimes you have to find a friend who can confirm your identity.

So yeah. Make sure that the issuing CA doesn't get overrun by orcs before the replica thinks and you a hardcopy that is trustworthy enough.

[ivan_gammel]

Does any government in the world issue only digital IDs?

There‘s always possibility to have your travel passport as a backup (and when traveling abroad your domestic ID is suitable for recovering passport).

[u1hcw9nx]

Not yet. Soon.

[Muromec]

Any governments announced the plans already? I somehow missed that, but you say it like it's a decided thing.

[niels8472]

Considering the actual physical id cards have an nfc chip which is used as the second factor for the digital id, this seems unlikely.

[lxgr]

It's probably not a great idea to depend on friends or family to remotely bootstrap you out of a situation like that anyway, given deepfake impersonation scams.

[robocat]

I give friends a codeword before I go overseas (verbally but next time I'll write it on a note).

I learnt my lesson after online access to my bank was blocked for two weeks and I also lost a card two trips ago. Plus Chile blocked my phone IMEI (their beaurocracy fucked me up completely).

Western Union plus friends are a fantastic backup for when things go pear shaped.

[Muromec]

For that kind of a thing you usually have to be present, for which deepfakes are not a threat yet.

[loloquwowndueo]

A wallet is a wonderful invention that allows you to lose all your important items in one fell swoop

[M95D]

I keep ID+money separate from passport+cards.

[BrandoElFollito]

I just have one paper passport, the only passport that will be accepted abroad.

[lxgr]

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.

[reaperducer]

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…

[ab71e5]

Yeah losing is maybe a bad example. What about a software update bricking the device, or a hardware problem?

[nicoburns]

> the "money you have" is just an int32

If only it was a uint32

[doublerabbit]

My money is a boolean at this point.

    money_in_account=false;

[M95D]

Still better than half of uint32 possibilities.

[Brian_K_White]

Wanna take another stab at that? :)

[M95D]

Lol, I just wrote a bug.

[eesmith]

"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. :)

[chii]

> 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...

[joha4270]

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.

[TonyStr]

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.

[delusional]

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...

[wildylion]

Side question, but what happens if there's a technical error with the service provider that leads to double spending?

Example: we bought tickets worth 300 EUR from Deutsche Bahn, they were hit by a DDoS and couldn't complete the transaction.

We got charged *twice* (i.e. 600 EUR and not refunded yet. AND no tickets!!!

Now they claim all they can do is to give us 600 EUR in vouchers (that are not even transferrable).

Would a Chargeback work in this case?

And my friend (who's ordered the tickets) has a very traditional bank that only gives a statement monthly, and probably accepts claims on every 29 of February, between 7 and 8 AM and only by fax (IYKYK those German companies...)

[TonyStr]

Thank you! Will read up on this.

[filcuk]

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.

[delusional]

> 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.

[have_faith]

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).

[0_____0]

Ah yes, who needs the Federal Reserve when you have Kansas' own Emprise Bank.

[lxgr]

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.

[chii]

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.

[p0w3n3d]

Witnessing this or Texas floods, politicians in my country dare to say that `We don't need cash'

[ge96]

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.

[throwmitid1234]

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.

[dzhiurgis]

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.

[neya]

> "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?)

[surgical_fire]

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.

[dijit]

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).

[surgical_fire]

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.

[dijit]

You can disagree, that's fine.

But anything you can touch has the risk of being forged or destroyed.

The whole point of bank notes was that they're centrally backed- someone would take the responsibility of ensuring that it's hard to forge and backed by something "real".

But centralising it so completely has pretty concrete drawbacks, which is fine, if your infrastructure is perfectly reliable and your banks are trustworthy.

History has shown us that infrastructure is never perfect, and banks are not perfectly trustworthy. So, hedge your own risks.

A personal tragedy (losing some money) is materially different than the entire economy being screwed because of a programming issue, or a city being screwed because of an internet outage, or a person and their family being (additionally) screwed because they offended a politician.

It's just.. different levels, and the centralised convenience becomes a pretty catastrophic impact in the worst case; and on a long enough timeline, the worst case is inevitable.

[surgical_fire]

I still disagree. I personally welcome the move to less physical money.

> A personal tragedy (losing some money) is materially different than the entire economy being screwed because of a programming issue, or a city being screwed because of an internet outage, or a person and their family being (additionally) screwed because they offended a politician.

If you live in a place where you can be financially screwed because you offended a politician, you have a lot more problems than if money is physical or not.

Also, you are disproportionately overstating the issues with digital money (I am still to see an example of a city being screwed because of Internet outage or programming issue). And you are also disproportionately shrugging away issues with physical money (it makes forgery and criminal activity much easier in many levels, to huge damage to society).

[dijit]

fair enough that you prefer it, but personal preference isn't really the point is it?

you said you're "still to see an example of a city being screwed because of an internet outage or programming issue"- so let me help you out there.

july 2024: CHAPS goes down in the UK. that's the system that moves about £345 billion per day between high street banks. same week, crowdstrike takes out banking systems globally. two separate issues, one week, absolute chaos.

2018: visa has a hardware failure across europe. 5 million transactions just.. fail. ten hours. nothing. people standing at tills with money in their accounts and absolutely nothing to show for it.

square, fiserv, tsys - all had outages in the last few years, each one leaving tens of thousands of merchants dead in the water.

last i checked, payment outages cost US retail alone something like $44 billion a year. not a theoretical risk, just tuesday.

oh, and there's currently a ransomware attack on a payment processor called bridgepay that's knocked out card payments for multiple cities in texas, michigan, wisconsin.. still ongoing. https://cybersecuritynews.com/bridgepay-ransomware-attack/

you're right that i'm overstating nothing. these things happen constantly, and when they do, the blast radius is enormous compared to your wallet getting nicked.

the forgery point is fine, i already said physical money has problems too. but a forged tenner affects one person. a downed payment processor affects a country. those aren't comparable problems and treating them as such is what i'm pushing back on.

[davidguetta]

Now go read about fractional reserve banking

[sinnsro]

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)

[ksimukka]

More like a float with a precision of 18.

Most of us who work in payment systems care a lot about precision and reliability.

[silisili]

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?

[parl_match]

Okay... but a float? High precision sounds great but uh... got a lot of issues. If you know what I mean.

[boobsbr]

Not an int32, but a BigDecimal.

[zvqcMMV6Zcr]

Isn't it handled by COBOL or some other ancient language that only supports strings?

[boobsbr]

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.