A Tale of Two Deposits

The past week, I had two deposit problems, one with Bitcoin, the other a check into my bank account.

Check Fail

A week after making a single check deposit, I noticed that the deposit was not there. Nothing. Fortunately, I had kept the deposit receipt, so I called the bank. This was Tuesday.

Wednesday, the bank called and said that everything hopefully would be cleared up overnight. It wasn't. Then it was noon. Then overnight. Then, tomorrow. And so forth.

Apparently, by this time the check had been sent to the Federal Reserve, which made it even harder to fixx the problem.

Friday, the branch manager contacted me, and said that their new system had somehow scanned the check in as a blank piece of paper. Not sure what that had to with anything, but I made the comment that it was a good thing that the deposit was not that large, but many people would really be hurt by not having the expected money in their account. She told me that in that case, they would of course cover any fees, and overdraft as necessary. My personal experience is that even when my personal bank officer is watching my account, there is nothing they can do to cover ACH or other electronic fund transfers, so those would likely bounce.

Saturday morning, the deposit was in my account, but since I haven't heard from anyone, I don't know if it is just temporary, or really fixed.

Bear in mind that there was nothing unusual with the deposit, and I even used pre-printed bank deposit sheets, and made another deposit at the same time to a different account that had no problems. Just a glitch in a new system.

Since the deposit went a week without the bank noticing, then their internal ledger systems failed. If I had not caught the problem, I know they wouldn't have.

Crypto Success

I finally decided to get serious about cold wallet storage, so I dug out a Trezor I had, and began the process of moving funds over from my Bitcoin Core Wallet on a Windows machine (yes, I know, I was asking for it).

I made a small transfer to the Trezor to test, and it went through. I tried another one, experimenting with the fee scale on each just to see how long it took to clear each, and it went through. Then I made a larger one.

The Bitcoin app crashed. This was large enough to pucker my butt a bit. Much larger than the bank deposit mentioned earlier. I relaunched the app, and the coins were not there, nor the transaction, nor were they in the Trezor. Ok, "take a deep breath, and trust Satoshi and the system" I kept saying to myself.

I've spent the past year studying crypto and blockchain, so I was reasonably certain that everything would work out. (I am by no means an expert, but I understand the concepts and the revolution of the technology) I relaunched the app, and it was 22 hours behind. This means it was partially crashed the entire time, and of course the first transfers had not finished all of the confirmations.

Time for a beer. Another deep breath. "Trust the system. Trust the system". Once the blocks were synchronized, the last transfer still was not in the original wallet or the new one. "Trust the system. Trust the system"

After another 15 minutes - about a beer - most of the last transfer just popped into the original wallet, so at least if the rest did not come back, it was a smaller loss. "Trust the system. Trust the system." A few minutes later, the rest popped into the original wallet. Whew

The distributed, decentralized, autonomous, Internet of money system discovered the problem all on it's own, without the need for a centralized authority or even humans to "correct" the problem.

TL;DR

Analog banking world loses deposit and takes humans days to correct; Bitcoin app crash caused a wallet-to-wallet transfer to fail, but is corrected automatically without humans in under an hour.