Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

Pix is amazing, really. The technical side is incredible—I remember reading or watching some really good content about the architecture, but I can’t recall exactly where and haven’t been able to find it again. All payments have to be completed in under 100ms, which is impressive considering how resilient the infrastructure needs to be to handle thousands of transactions per second.

I once looked at the requirements to be able to handle all the debit/credit transactions in the US, and you can do that on _one_ mid-range server easily. With regular PostgreSQL, no need for anything exotic.

Of course, the real deployment will need redundancy, failover, multiple levels of audit records, etc.

But still, modern computers are _powerful_.

Yeah, probably. What impresses me the most is the resilience — there’s been downtime only a handful of times.