> Would you bet millions of dollars on the goodness of the typical person?

This is about business to business, not business to consumer. I suggest to talk to a financial/accounting person in a big company. Often enough there are mistakes in payments that are only noticed by the other business. This despite all the various layers that should've prevented the entire problem.

I don't mean small mistakes either, I mean where someone wanted to enter something like 1234.56 (two decimals), but it ended up as 1234560.00. Basically a mixup between the decimal and thousand separator; such mistakes happen way more often than you'd think. I've heard various stories of a vendor notifying the company that they've been overpaid, e.g. the 1000 times what it should've been, but also various other kinds of mistakes.

Some companies have been working together for various decades. Employees might've switched between the companies, people know each other. It really isn't uncommon to have quite a bit of trust between companies. Obviously, this does depend on the country. In some parts of the world there's more trust than other parts.

That's how credit card processing operated worldwide for many decades. That's also how hawala works. And Wikipedia, if you want a non-monetary example.

They are all literally trusting in the goodness of the typical person. And then doing some careful analysis and planning. And fraud detection for the rare misdeeds.

But a credit card still keeps track of how much you spend - it doesn't rely on you honestly reporting how much you spent over the month...

Oh, I think they are talking about the earlier period where you just did a carbon copy of the card, got it signed, and if the card was a fake there was certainly no way to tell at the time. It would be the equivalent of a bad check, talking the days before swipe machines.

I guess, but discounting active fraud, there is still a paper trail of how much you spent; The bank will still have said "We think you owe us $100, here is our reasoning based on things you signed" never "you spent some amount of money we're not sure of - please give it to us" or "all of our customers spent $1million, so let us have your share, whatever you think that may be" as would be the case here.

Yes, the system would fall apart if you disputed every single transaction and made them supply irrefutable evidence you did in fact authorise the transaction - but it doesn't revolve entirely on the trust that people will keep their own account of what they think they spent.

Sure, but the store that accepted the invalid credit card has traditionally been on the hook. The store is the one being targeted even if the person whose credit card was stolen can get off with disputing the charge.

And before everything was networked, there was no way for a store to check with the credit card company that the card wasn't reported stolen. That's the trusting people part, it's the store that is trusting people without the ability to even verify that the card hasn't been reported stolen.

Yes, there is a paper trail, but the situation I'm talking about is analogous to a bad check or a counterfeit bill -- there's no recourse if the bad actor can't be found and the store is on the hook.

Ah I understand now - from the shop’s point of view yes there is risk in this.

I am just about old enough to remember this time - it’s funny to think that security hinged on checking if the signature looked ‘right’. For cheques I remember here at least for yours to actually be accepted anywhere you needed a ‘cheque guarantee card’ which was basically just a debit card but with a fancy hologram - so a certificate of your ‘goodness’ - up to a certain limit per cheque. The shop would copy the details and this would supposedly guarantee they’ll be paid.

I was going to say that shops could have asked for ID - but at this time driving licences didn’t have a picture and weren’t cards - so no one carried them anyway. There was probably a lot of ‘subjective’ acceptance around the place (‘does this person look trustworthy, would they really be given a credit card or did they steal it?’) come to think of it…

Yes, I didn't want it to veer off topic, but I think it is extremely obvious that such standards involved implicit or explicit biases, as well as real recognition of individual customers' actual past behavior (like if a gas station has taken advantage of them in the past).

I assume the companies then just passed the risk onto the consumer (or ate it to grow their user base), I find it hard to believe they just continued operating on the honor system.

Would you bet millions of dollars on payment system with zero redundancy? Also with that kind of money involved I wouldn't be surprised if you could could get a court case running and force them to report how much they took.

I mean that’s how lots of business works? Is that not the whole basis of invoicing? I must be misunderstanding

An invoice would say “you owe $x for y gallons of gas” not “hey pay us some money for that gas you got”

True, but still: a lot of (big) businesses are still quite unhappy if they didn't pay what they should've paid. It also creates an uncertainty for them, there's often various years where the money can be requested back. Plus as far as I know, if you notice an error there's various financial rules you need to follow. You cannot just treat it as "cost saved". As a result, it is way easier to notify the other party and get a mistake fixed.

I think there's a way they could count the number of all the trucks without a computer.

When all parties are losing a bunch of money on acount of the shutdown, the rational choice would be to accept some lesser risk than these known losses in order to get things working to some degree, if that were technically feasible.

It shouldn't even be up to them to make a rational choice. It should be required via federal regulation on utilities.

No, I would create legislation that mandates that the pipeline must keep running in situations like this at the company's expense

> Would you bet millions of dollars on the goodness of the typical person?

Somewhere in that question is an answer to the Fermi paradox!