Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 59. (Read 2032247 times)

yes, keep stacking. metals are backed by history. they were and still are a solid hedge.

This bank had pioneered a process called straight-through processing (STP) which removes the normal manual processes of placement, checking, settling and clearing of trades. Trades done in the global marketplace typically have a 5-day clearing period to allow for all the paperwork and book-keeping to be done. This elaborate system allowed same-day settlement, something never previously possible. The bank had achieved this over a period of six years by developing a computer system with a degree of complexity that rivalled SkyNet. By 2006 it also probably had enough processing power to become self-aware, and the storage requirements were absolutely colossal. It consisted of hundreds of bleeding edge compute-farm blade servers, several £multi-million top-end database servers and the project had over 300 staff just to keep it running. To put that into perspective, the storage for this one system (one of about 500 major trading systems at the bank) represented over 80% of the total storage used within the company. The equivalent of 100 DVD's worth of raw data entered the databases each day as it handled over a million inter-bank trades, each ranging in value from a few hundred thousand dollars to multi-billion dollar equity deals. This thing was BIG.

You'd think such a critically important and expensive system would run on the finest, fault-tolerant hardware and software. Unfortunately, it had grown somewhat organically over the years, with bits being added here, there and everywhere. There were parts of this system that no-one understood any more, as the original, lazy developers had moved company, emigrated or *died* without documenting their work. I doubt they ever predicted the monster it would eventually become.

A colleague of mine one day decided to perform a change during the day without authorisation, which was foolish, but not uncommon. It was a trivial change to add yet more storage and he'd done it many times before so he was confident about it. The guy was only trying to be helpful to the besieged developers, who were constantly under pressure to keep the wretched thing moving as it got more bloated each day, like an electronic ‘Mr Creosote’.

As my friend applied his change that morning, he triggered a bug in a notoriously crap script responsible for bringing new data disks online. The script had been coded in-house as this saved the bank about £300 per year on licensing fees for the official ‘storage agents’ provided by the vendor. Money that, in hindsight, would perhaps have been better spent instead of pocketed. The homebrew code took one look at the new configuration and immediately spazzed out. This monged scrap of pisspoor geek-scribble had decided the best course of action was to bring down the production end of the system and bring online the disaster recovery (DR) end, which is normal behaviour when it detects a catastrophic 'failure'. It’s designed to bring up the working side of the setup as quickly as possible. Sadly, what with this system being fully-replicated at both sites (to [cough] ensure seamless recovery), the exact same bug was almost instantly triggered on the DR end, so in under a minute, the hateful script had taken offline the entire system in much the same manner as chucking a spanner into a running engine might stop a car. The databases, as always, were flushing their precious data onto many different disks as this happened, so massive, irreversible data corruption occurred. That was it, the biggest computer system in the bank, maybe even the world, was down.

And it wasn't coming back up again quickly.

(OK, detail over. Calm down)

At the time this failure occurred there was more than $12 TRILLION of trades at various stages of the settlement process in the system. This represented around 20% of ALL trades on the global stock market, as other banks had started to plug into this behemoth and use its capabilities themselves. If those trades were not settled within the agreed timeframe, the bank would be liable for penalties on each and every one, the resulting fines would eclipse the market capital of the company, and so it would go out of business. Just like that.

My team dropped everything it was doing and spent 4 solid, brutal hours recovering each component of the system in a desperate effort to coax the stubborn silicon back online. After a short time, the head of the European Central Bank (ECB) was on a crisis call with our company CEO, demanding status updates as to why so many trades were failing that day. Allegedly (as we were later told), the volume of financial goodies contained within this beast was so great that failure to clear the trades would have had a significant negative effect on the value of the Euro currency. This one fuckup almost started a global economic crisis on a scale similar to the recent (and ongoing) sub-prime credit crash. With two hours to spare before the ECB would be forced to go public by adjusting the Euro exchange rate to compensate, the system was up and running, but barely. We each manned a critical sub-component and diverted all resources into the clearing engines. The developers set the system to prioritise trades on value. Everything else on those servers was switched off to ensure every available CPU cycle and disk operation could be utilised. It saturated those machines with processing while we watched in silence, unable to influence the outcome at all.

Come on man.
It's a good time to buy more.
Dollars can't keep this strength for long. They'll eventually pop again and our magic metal and our fancy crypto money will go up again.

Shiny coins: this is what I see now!
 

yes, i've never actually gotten around to reading that altho i've read many summaries of it and tend to agree with it's theories.  this is the Wences version of the origin of money and makes perfect sense that ppl would quite naturally start off keeping track of debts owed first with memory and then via tracking mechanisms (ledgers).  gold is a dervative of this theory and is quite cumbersome and impractical and thus never quite got out of the blocks in a major way in a modern society.  not to mention all it's faults which allow it to be manipulated into oblivion despite it's relatively fixed supply (2% inflation).

Bitcoin is hard and fixed.  all this extrapolation from Matonis about inflating the supply as a result of raising the block limit is nonsense.  they are completely two different issues.  one involves imagination while the other is a no brainer.  

Gold collapsing. Bitcoin collapsing. It won't stop...

In a society (which is the opposite of a self-sufficient, paleolitic, pre-patriarchal, anarchic community), assets are always valued in debt (=money).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

When debt (money) disappeared, the society disappeared as well. That's 'life' since the neolithic revolution, the invention of the state (organized violence).

Crypto/Bitcoin is the best enemy of the society.
@Fonestar, a brilliant commentator of the articles on Zero Knowledge: "The Bitcoiners are going to totally destroy your society and your laws"

I and J.P. Morgan disrespectfully disagree:
"Gold Is Money, Everything Else Is Credit"

Metals are only derivatives of money (which is debt, from the very beginning). Without debt, there is no economy, but self-sufficiency (anarchy).

Metals are only derivatives of money (which is debt, from the very beginning). Without debt, there is no economy, but self-sufficiency (anarchy).

Gold collapsing. Bitcoin collapsing. It won't stop...

yeah, because no one ever used gold and silver as money, or any other commodity-money. Or if they did, they were paleolithic, like USA 1-2 centuries ago.
[/leftist drivel]

You of all ungrateful people here need to show a little more respect for the work of the devs, especially LukeJr.

In a society (which is the opposite of a self-sufficient, paleolitic, pre-patriarchal, anarchic community), assets are always valued in debt (=money).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years