News reports such as this one indicate that the above number may have arisen as a programming bug.
A man in the United States popped out to his local petrol station to buy a pack of cigarettes - only to find his card charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.
That is $23 quadrillion (£14 quadrillion) - many times the US national debt.*
In hex it's $523DC2E199EBB4 which doesn't appear terribly interesting at first sight.
Anyone have any thoughts about what programming error would have caused this?
Probably just a corrupt bit or something during the network communication or a write that error checking failed to catch.
Or they were really nice cigarettes.
I once heard those numbers come over the radio as I was flying across the Pacific.
Add the cents to the number and you get 2314885530818450000, which in hexadecimal is 2020 2020 2020 1250.
Do you see the pattern? The first six bytes have been overwritten by spaces (hex 20, dec 32).
If the number was in IEEE 754, then the significand could have been 2.3148855308184500 and the exponent got mangled from 1 to 54 by some bug, causing the massive price explosion.
There are any number of things that could cause a very rare error like this - race conditions and alpha radiation, just to name two. If the error changed a pointer rather than the value being used, it would change the value to just about any random number. Bitwise, large random numbers are more likely than small random numbers.
Edit: It certainly appears to be a software bug, since 13000 other people were affected.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/15/quadrillion.dollar.glitch/index.html
If you remove the trailing zero, this validates as a VISA card number. My guess is they swiped the card then manually entered the number, thinking the swipe had failed.
If you use the binary equivelant (1110101110110100) decode of the number 23148855308184500, you get K鑛, which is the Mandarin character for mining and ore. Kmine could mean "knowledge mine," or something like kmine Holdings Ltd. Perhaps there's a correlation between K(mine or ore) and Bank of America or Visa?
What happens when you make a purchase by card is that the software immediately goes online to ensure you have sufficient funds for the purchase, but only places a hold on the funds for the transaction. At the end of the working day the software then gathers all the transactions placed in the last 24hrs and submits them to the acquiring bank for processing.
The submission to the bank is known as settlement, and its done by sending a plain text file in a very rigid format. (This was all developed decades ago and the number of systems now using it makes it hard to modernise)
Each transaction appears in the file as a line of text, and part of that is the transaction value. This field should be 11 numeric characters (zero padded on the left hand side) and will always hold the value in lowest common denominator (in this case cents). 11 numeric characters caters well for values in any currency.
Looks like the payment processor in this case had made some changes to their submission software and erroneously replaced the zero padding with space padding. Quite how this got by a) service provider, b) acquiring bank and c) Visa without being picked up escapes me. The net value of that settlement file (13,000 high value transactions) would have been astronomical, and maybe that also was a contributing factor somewhere.
Batman: Pretty fishy what happened to me on that ladder.
Gordon: You mean, where there's a fish, there could be a Penguin.
Robin: But wait! It happened at sea! See? "C" for Catwoman!
Batman: Yet... an exploding shark was pulling my leg!
Gordon: The Joker!
O'Hara: [It] all adds up to a sinister riddle. Riddle-er. Riddler?
Gordon: Oh! A thought strikes me! So dreadful I scarcely dare give it utterance.
Batman: The four of them. Their forces combined...
Robin: Holy nightmare!
Well, let's look at the number 23,148,855,308,184,500. The first two digits are 23 - a number known to be tied to many numerological conspiracies, and even the subject of several documentaries. Add all the digits, 2+3+1+4+8+8+5+5+3+0+8+1+8+4+5+0+0 = 11, which we'll get back to in a moment. The hexadecimal form of the number, 523DC2E199EBB4, shows a pair of 9s. So we have three numbers that stand out - 23, 9, and 11. Thus, this case is really the final proof that the Illuminati was behind 9/11.
The ultimate mystery is still where 12 50 is coming from. They are the ASCII codes for Ctrl+R, P. Which happens to be the secret keystrokes you have to type to enter the validation code for QuickBooks.
Link: Where to enter Validation code
Quite a coincidence. I wonder what happens when you type these keys in the wrong place...
If you shift left 64-bit representation 8 bits left (multiply by 256) You will get a well formed credit card number and 3 empty positions for thise 3 secure extra numbers (all zeroes for some reason). There is only 1 out of 10 chance that random number gives a well formed CC number.
5926 1069 5889 5232 000