| I agree with you that having a centralized bank is not always a problem. I admit that I store my money on one of those good old usual banks. I don't really like my bank, but I'm generally happy with the service it gives me. I live in a country where there are regulations on what banks can do, which is cool too. I don't really read the news, but I still get to hear every once in a while about some government backed bank that has decided to erase some people's debts. Money invented and gone, out of thin air. However, even those things are not the main reasons to create a decentralized bank. Think about the following setting: You want to create a small internet like network in some place in the world. Maybe a place where you don't have banks you can really trust, or even a government that you can trust. So you deploy some boxes, and you get a working network. Everybody on this network pays some kind of virtual money for his use of the network. (He just pays for the electricity, and the box does the real work). The balances are managed by the network itself, somehow. You don't need to find some external bank to make this work, and fulfil his arbitrary tax or other strange regulations. You don't have to trust an external bank. You just plug in the power and it just works. I don't need the bank here to give me "buyer protection", insurance or the ability to invest in funds. I just want a tool to make sure that if one person sends more messages in the network than somebody else, than he needs to compensate the other person somehow. Another important reason for which I believe decentralized banks are important is the ability to deal with micro-payments. One of our biggest problems these days is how a small amount of people, with limited amount of resources, can serve billions requests of people from all over the globe. Just check the job listings. They all search for people that can "Scale the backend". I don't know if a regular bank can deal with transactions of "move 0.003 cents from Alice to Bob, for data transfer work". However, I think that a distributed bank can deal with it pretty well. I hope that this relates to your question. Please tell me what you think if you are still around. |