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Comment by amalcon | Hacker News Reader

Integer cents is fantastic for POS software and similar things that deal with at most a few thousand dollars at a time. The place where it starts to fail is when the absolute numbers get really large, not really small. Think "United States Federal Reserve" or "UBS". Then remember that some of these institutions need to deal with accounts denominated in Zimbabwean dollars.

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Really small can be an issue when it gets really small e.g. tarsnap’s accounting is pretty infamously done in attodollars (1e-12). U64 only has room for 19 decimal digits so you’re limited to 7 figures up.

Tarsnap's pricing is in picodollars (1e-12) but the accounting is attodollars (1e-18). Tarsnap uses 128-bit balances -- 64 bits of attodollars and 64 bits of whole dollars.

If I ever have someone paying me more than 2^64 dollars, I'll rewrite Tarsnap's accounting system.

Funny thing, I actually wrote one POS application (magstripe + EMV chip & pin + contactless).

EMV uses integers encoded as BCD for money. If I remember well, in most cases it is 6 bytes or 12 digits. That is more than 2^32 (most of POS machines were 32 bit ARM until relatively recently).

The terminal I worked on had 32 bit ARM. Rather than convert 12 digit numbers to 32 bit integers I decided to write my own arithmetic library that did operations directly on BCD strings of arbitrary length (but, in practice, EMV only allows 6 bytes for the amount anyway).

The current US national debt represented in integer cents requires 52 bits. It can trivially increase 4,000x before we need to worry about 64-bit balances.

Peak inflation in Argentina was 20262.80%.

So, not as much margin as one might think.

Python can deal with 1000+ digit integers and you can store them as strings in the database. Not sure about other languages.

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