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Problem with a central server for money is that it makes the whole state vulnerable. If everybody use central bank e-currency you can just attack their sever to
by socialdemocrat 7y ago
Problem with a central server for money is that it makes the whole state vulnerable. If everybody use central bank e-currency you can just attack their sever to destroy the flow of all money.
But if it is distributed like real crypto currency, you have to be able to attack and take down hundreds or thousands of severs geographically spread.
- teh_infallible 7y agoI don’t know why your comment is being downvoted. That was my understanding as well. A distributed ledger is much harder to tamper with, which is why “blockchain technology” is actually a reasonable solution to this problem, IMO. I am open to being proven wrong, though
- lawn 7y agoI did not downvote him, but a cryptocurrency is only tamper proof because the entities that decide the rules are distributed (in Bitcoin it's the miners who extend the blockchain). So to being down the Bitcoin network you need to bring down all the miners, which is basically impossible. But here there's only a single entity that decides the rules. So if you shut down riksbanken's servers, the servers that are deciding which transactions are valid, you essentially shut down the network. Sure you can have thousands of servers around the globe sharing the last seen state or new but not yet verified transactions, but that's not a very useful network. They would instantly be discarded once riksbanken's servers come online to sort out the mess. You can have this problem in Bitcoin too, if you isolate a majority of the miners from the rest of the network, essentially splitting it in too. But that's much harder to do. Edit: Here I refer to deciding double spends, which the critical problem any digital currency needs to solve. Without it anyone can print money out of thin air.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- surfsvammel 7y agoI don’t disagree with you, but central server for money is what we have had since the beginning of time right? We have central banks, where banks have cash, and and central securities depositories, where they have their securities.
- thoughtstheseus 7y agoYup, this is nothing new.