Comment by apaprocki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apaprocki | Hacker News Reader

Just wanted to point out that this has affected software revolving around finance for some time now. Historical data goes back into the 1800s and there are bonds with very, very long horizons (100-year or approaching it). The last time I checked on Bloomberg I believe the latest maturity date I could find in the system was sometime in 2089. I think the industries that have had to deal with this already will not be very affected by 2038.

edit: Link to C++ N3344 paper we wrote, describing how we represent dates (times/datetimes are similar): http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2012/n334...

edit2: Anyone interested in examples -- on the early side:

    ISIN GB0000436070, UK Gilt, issued 1853, perpetual annuity

On the future side, things have changed since I last looked. Example bonds with the latest dates I can find are:

    ISIN XS0560190901, Dong Energy A/S, callable 06/01/3010
    ISIN US786581AA66, HSBC Holdings Luxembourg SA, callable 10/15/2997

Right, but just because you have a data type that can handle a date that far in the future does not imply that you have fixed your OS and supporting software to be able to handle the day when the system time rolls over.

Yes, it really just depends how much your software stack depends on the OS and higher level OS-related services. If your software is not coupled with other points of failure in OS user-land, then you really only need a single entry point to get network-sync'd 64-bit time_t and then everything else in the stack can be built around vocabulary data types such as these. These are the types that are transmitted in protocols, serialized to files, etc.

That is insanely cool. How does that even work? Does the original bond issuer even exist anymore? If I'm holding a bond with a call date of 3010, what do you even do with that?

These bonds have scheduled payments so the idea is that you are earning yield on your investment for 1,000 years. You're getting paid as time rolls on -- you're not waiting for the maturity date. All the parameters of the bond indicate how risky the market sees the investment. If Joe Nobody wants to issue a 1,000 year bond, the market would demand an appropriate rate given the risk involved. Most likely, it would never be issued because no one would be safe with that level of risk. I'm guessing the market considers HSBC Luxembourg pretty safe.

What kind of yields would that be though? I would expect that I would get my original investment returned to me many times over during my lifetime. After that, it wouldn't matter to me, but rather to my descendants.

Coupon on the HSBC bond is 7.125%.

Fascinating, where do you find these bonds and/or info on them? Do you work for a financial institution that have internal proprietary access to such information, or is this publicly searchable?

All that info is on Bloomberg.

The 2070 problem is going to be much more serious. The only stuff still running code then will be stuff we're terrified to touch like reactor control systems and such.

I hope I live to see it.

Not bonds, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_lease shows leases of land that run for 999 years.

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