alt Hacker News> 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...
Replies
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.
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.
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).
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.