All first world governments have some degree of corruption from money in politics, but don’t kid yourselves: USA is much worse than most

Ok so firstly you’re not the OP I was replying to, so neither of us know for certain whether they were talking about replacing the banking system with a decentralised currency vs keeping the existing centralised private banks and just having them use a blockchain as their database. I assumed the former because of their wording (“replace the banking system”), and because the latter offers no advantages that I know of.

Secondly if you think a blockchain would offer some advantages over other more efficient write only databases, I’d be interested to know what those are, because to me if you’re not running a decentralised system then you’re only getting the downsides of blockchain (such as it being single threaded, slow, and space inefficient) without any of the upsides.

For some background, I’m well aware of how both blockchains and crypto work, having been obsessed with them for a little while in 5 or 6 years ago like many of us were before becoming disillusioned. I’ve also got professional experience as a developer on both immutable databases and banking ledgers.

A banking system running on Blockchain

Is an astronomically terrible idea. It:

• would use as much electricity as an entire country
• payments/transfers would be both much slower AND much more expensive than via a bank
• would have no protection against fraud. You got scammed? Your money’s gone. You paid for something online and it never arrived? Too bad
• would have no way to stop money laundering
• would have no way to help people who forgot their password, they’d just lose their life savings permanently
• would tie up a bunch of capital, preventing reinvestment and growth. There would be no way to get a bank loan to buy a house for example
• the list goes on

All of my Bluetooth devices work flawlessly these days. What are you using?

Most software is a terrible pile of unreadable code with no tests and horrible architecture choices, that somehow manages to keep working just through the power of years of customers finding bugs and complaining loud enough to get them fixed.

If you write any automated tests at all, you’re already better than most “professional” software companies. If you have a CI/CD pipeline, you’re far ahead.

Was it ever good?

I don’t think you understand how fractional reserve banking works. The first paragraph of that Wikipedia page already clearly contradicts you. The banks can still only lend money they have (otherwise how would they lend it? Where would it come from? Only the central bank can print currency). What fractional reserve banking is saying is that banks can invest some portion of the customer deposits that they hold into non-liquid assets, often in the form of loans to other customers, but it could also be invested in other things eg government bonds. The interest banks earn by doing that helps pay for the interest they pay to customers on their saving. They also have to carefully manage their liquidity: maximising returns while still holding enough liquid assets to cover any potential spikes in withdrawals.

Even when investing customer funds, banks still have to meet captial requirements set by the regulators which basically say that their risk-adjusted assets have to cover the liabilities of customer deposits, so that for example they can’t just invest all the deposits in Bitcoin as that would pose too high a risk of insolvency. The reason SVB went insolvent recently was that they successfully lobbied the Trump administration to relax capital requirements for banks of their size, then made risky investments that lost money and they suddenly had less money than they owed their customers.

My superpower is that I can plug in USB A the right way up on the first try pretty much every time

Ability to use the internet well means you have a lot of information at your disposal and can educate yourself out of believing in fairy tales

Hah I had the opposite reaction, I’ll surprised how many people there are in this comment section arguing that God is real. I didn’t know religious people knew how to use the internet tbh