this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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Uh, security at multiple levels, dispute resolution, dealing with inaccurate floating point math, CAP theorem limitations, throughput.... And those are just the challenges I can come up not having worked in the financial clearing domain.
No. You cannot just build one of these at a code jam, you cannot launch a startup to build one of these in a few months. It's a system with one of the highest fidelity requirements outside of medical equipment. Even space technology is allowed to fail for being off by a little bit. Financial systems at scale are hella difficult.
TIL about the CAP theorem.
As I understand it, they use fixed point values in finance, so it's not any worse. You could use arbitrary precision arithmetic if performance wasn't an issue, but it is, and why would you want that anyway?
I can't really comment on scale, but it's been a couple years Russia got kicked out of SWIFT, so they've had time.
Russia's not going to develop it on it's own. It would need to be organized internationally through multi-stakeholdership in order to generate the trust required by all the nation. The systems design is one thing, but the political design is something else entirely. Who runs it, who audits it, how they audit it, who can change it, how decisions get made, incident response protocols, breach disclosure agreements, etc. Developing the governance system for it would likely take far more person-hours than developing the technology
Yeah, a few other countries are mentioned. Obviously this is do to Russia getting kicked out of SWIFT, given the timing and that SWIFT has been around and used by everyone for decades.
I'm sure governance is a huge job. The political will is definitely there, though.