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.
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?
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.
There‘s always possibility to have your travel passport as a backup (and when traveling abroad your domestic ID is suitable for recovering passport).
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.
If only it was a uint32
money_in_account=false;Damn, that's terrifyingly eye opening. That's a really, really strong argument for physical cash (or gold maybe?)
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...
Similar to what the author describes, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this information is generally not public.
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...
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.
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.
Most of us who work in payment systems care a lot about precision and reliability.
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. :)
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)
COBOL serializes everything to strings in a flat file.
We're currently planning on migrating the flat files to a Sybase DB.
All of those have some very annoying fail scenarios too.
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).
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.
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.
> 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).
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.