Corruption. They also co-opt well meaning, highly compensated Individual Contributors at Stripe and other fintech companies, who write on this forum self edifying posts about their own personal genius and the complexity of incrementing and decrementing integers.
> the complexity of incrementing and decrementing integers.
This is tantamount to saying that all of software is just flipping a bunch of tiny switches on and off. Reconciliation of thousands of transactions per second across billions of customers spread around the globe doesn't have as trivial of a solution as dunking on straw men in HN comments.
Whether or not the level of complexity involved with this is justified is a value judgment that I'll refrain from making but it's pretty obvious to anybody that's worked in the industry that things aren't as simple as a layperson might think.
You are borderline doing exactly the thing I am lampooning. You just are missing the part where you explain how complicated it is to decrement integers at the same time as incrementing integers and why.
