You guys embracing a cashless society are nuts. Sure there are benefits in some scenarios but after what happened with Crowdstrike, all those wonderful machines go down leaving people helpless such as buying anything like food. I always have a stash of cash in case of emergency which I had to rely on right when Crowdstrike struck (i.e. hot water tank).
Many banks (and other critical computer infrastructure) have been running on IBM AIX machines for decades now without issue. Imagine if IBM pushed a faulty AIX update (like CrowdStrike did) and crashed the American banking sector. Then you'd be saying we should never have money in banks and should keep all cash on hand.
The reason why CrowdStrike did push out a faulty update and IBM hasn't, has a lot to do with the fact that Windows isn't a very robust OS (because it must support too many different pieces of hardware) and AIX is a robust OS (because IBM supports their own hardware alone).
So, if we just avoid using OS' that should never be used for mission critical purposes (like Windows) and instead use software that is much more robust (like a purpose-built Linux kernel or a UNIX variant like AIX, made for specific hardware), the chances of CrowdStrike happening will be drastically lower.
If the yuan goes digital, I guarantee that the back-end systems (software and hardware) will all be custom-built, with at least as much scrutiny on each patch as IBM puts on AIX. There will be no repeats of the stupid "we didn't test our product before release" CrowdStrike outage.
