blockchain database

A decentralised monetary network ensures that, by sitting outside the evermore connected current financial infrastructure one can mitigate the risks to be section of it when things go wrong. The 3 main risks of a centralised monetary system that have been highlighted consequently of the 2008 financial crisis are credit, liquidity and operational failure. In the US alone since 2008 there were 504 bank failures due to insolvency, there being 157 in 2010 alone. Typically this kind of collapse doesn't jeopardize account holder's savings due to federal/national backing and insurance for the first few hundred thousand dollars/pounds, the banks assets usually being absorbed by another financial institution however the impact of the collapse may cause uncertainty and short-term issues with accessing funds. Since a decentralised system just like the Bitcoin network is not dependent on a bank to facilitate the transfer of funds between 2 parties but rather depends on its thousands of users to authorise transactions it is more resilient to such failures, it having as much backups as you will find members of the network to make sure transactions remain authorised in case of just one member of the network'collapsing'(see below) block chain software.

A bank do not need to fail however to impact on savers, operational I.T. failures such as for instance the ones that recently stopped RBS and Lloyds'customers accessing their accounts for weeks can impact on one's ability to withdraw savings, these being a result of a 30-40 year old legacy I.T. infrastructure that's groaning under any risk of strain of keeping up with the growth of customer spending and deficiencies in investment in general. A decentralised system is not reliant on this sort of infrastructure, it instead being on the basis of the combined processing power of its thousands of users which ensures the capacity to scale up as necessary, a mistake in virtually any part of the system not inducing the network to grind to a halt blockchain database.

Liquidity is a final real threat of centralised systems, in 2001 Argentine banks froze accounts and introduced capital controls consequently of the debt crisis, Spanish banks in 2012 changed their small print to allow them to block withdrawals over a quantity and Cypriot banks briefly froze customer accounts and used around 10% of individual's savings to help pay off the National Debt blockchain technology.

As Jacob Kirkegaard, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics told the New York Times on the Cyrpiot example, "What the offer reflects is that becoming an unsecured or even secured depositor in euro area banks is not as safe since it used to be." In a decentralised system payment occurs with out a bank facilitating and authorising the transaction, payments only being validated by the network where you will find sufficient funds, there being no third party to stop a transaction, misappropriate it or devalue the total amount one holds.