"Whew, wondered where we'd put those 200,000 BTC!"

[Lodewijk andré de la porte]

2014-03-24 2:47 GMT+01:00 Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>:

> Their prime directive is that financial value can never be
> created or destroyed, so you can never have a situation in which a failure
> anywhere will result in one blob of financial value being recorded in two
> locations, or no locations.  Saying that you'll address this by rolling
> back
> transactions won't fly both because no standard database can handle the
> load
> they work at, and because the financial world isn't going to stop and wait
> while you perform a rollback.
>

So how do they do that? If there's power failure on a specific box, what
happens? Are all transactions synced to disk before commit, thus minimal
rollbacks? A minimal rollback takes a very small margin of what would
happen in case of power failure on a box. Maybe they have several boxes
advocating a single transaction, so that expectible failures would never
crash a system completely.

I can imagine mitigating this by redundantly processing everything, in
which case sequence must be kept somehow and so I can't imagine it being
ridiculously fast. Maybe you mean the throughput is insane, because that'd
make more sense given the multiple months of CPU being thrown at it. If you
didn't then caching would just slow things down (most of the time).

Finance should run better on SSDs, so I imagine this is an old story.

Overall a bit confusing, and I'd love some more details! Like, why are they
even using disks when fiber and RAM might be faster and similarly reliable?
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 2126 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20140324/c46a8bd6/attachment-0001.txt>