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I say cardinal sin would have been not storing amounts as integer.
Just curious, how would you manage bitcoin fractional shares.
Typedef int64_t CAmount;
Static const CAmount COIN = 100000000;
Static const CAmount MAX_MONEY = 21000000 * COIN;
I wonder how many companies in the world are basially built on warm words without any real value behind. I made the experience that a lot of people don't really care if a company has positive revenue streams anymore, they don't even know what a balance sheet is. They simply invest because other people do. And those other people invested because people before them did. This new style "invest billions now in a lossy st…
Trade on shares in the company was suspended What does this mean? Is a certain stock exchange not executing trades anymore? Are all exchanges worldwide in sync not executing trades? If so, how is the sync achieved? If it only was suspended at the Frankfurt stock exchange which is mentioned in the article, it would be interesting to see how it is doing at other exchanges. Google is still showing realtime Frankfurt pri…
Trading had resumed by then. It was supended temporarily (for one hour) just before the announcement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I say cardinal sin would have been not storing amounts as integer.
There's a cardinal pun somewhere in there but I can't think of it.
Something to do with using floats to indicate cardinality briefly plummeted, but was summarily dismissed.
Regardless, losing track of the numbers to accounts reminded me of this one place I worked where the transaction geese weren't recorded as explicit callouts on the transaction ledger, but rather had to be cross-referenced with final transaction amounts and the fee configuration for time period, but where the changing of fee configurations were not tracked with a granularity sufficient for resolving all ambiguity come audit time.
And I thought that was bad.
Trade on shares in the company was suspended What does this mean? Is a certain stock exchange not executing trades anymore? Are all exchanges worldwide in sync not executing trades? If so, how is the sync achieved? If it only was suspended at the Frankfurt stock exchange which is mentioned in the article, it would be interesting to see how it is doing at other exchanges. Google is still showing realtime Frankfurt pri…
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So basically the cardinal sin of payment processing then? Not that I'm surprised.
I say cardinal sin would have been not storing amounts as integer.
Just go give 2 ways of doing money storage in ints from Google's APIs...
For Google's Standard Payments APIs, we use micros: https://developers.google.com/standard-payments/v1/fops/bank...
> To represent a monetary value in micros, multiply the standard currency value by 1,000,000.
> USD$1.23 = 1230000 micro USD
Sadly, its different than other parts of Google with money/amount based APIs. GCP uses units + nanos: https://cloud.google.com/billing/v1/how-tos/catalog-api
> [UNITS] is the whole units of the amount. For example if currencyCode is "USD", then 1 unit is one US dollar.
> [NANOS] is the number of nano (10^-9) units of the amount. The value must be between -999,999,999 and +999,999,999 inclusive. If units is positive, nanos must be positive or zero. If units is zero, nanos can be positive, zero, or negative. If units is negative, nanos must be negative or zero. For example $-1.75 is represented as units=-1 and nanos=-750,000,000.
I keep imagining a Monty Python-esque skit:
"Was it stolen? We don't know."
"Was it spent? We don't know."
"Was it lent? We don't know."
"Was it transferred? We don't know."
"Was it burned? We don't know."
Coincidentally, or maybe not, the company's last fictitious balance sheet, which was published in November of last year, right before the scandal was revealed, reports approximately $2B in long-term debt.[a]
So, as much as Wirecard was in the business of processing financial transactions ($124B last year!), it was also secretly performing a magic act of borrowing money and making it disappear into thin air. In a way, it's been an "impressive" performance.
On a more serious note, I hope Wirecard's failure is not seen in hindsight as a "Creditanstalt moment."[b]
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[a] https://ir.wirecard.com/download/companies/wirecard/Presenta...
[b] The failure of Creditanstalt, an Austrian bank, in 1931, marks the beginning of the Great Depression in Europe: https://www.bis.org/publ/work333.pdf
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Billions of dollars just turned out not to be there. I'm going to throw out a challenge to the idea that the "little man" was the loser here on the basis that little men do not have billions of dollars to lose. Someone bigger than little lost here. If every man, woman and child in Germany chipped in $1,000 that still isn't a billion dollars.
It'd be around 80 billion dollars, actually