[jameskilton]

Wells Fargo customers must be terrified that their money is going to be gone when the service finally comes back. This downtime is obviously to prevent a bank rush while the leadership leaves the country with millions in customer funds.

Oh wait...

[shawnz]

Very funny, but you're describing a failure mode of bitcoin exchanges rather than the bitcoin network, which is not what the parent was talking about.

[spookthesunset]

> but you're describing a failure mode of bitcoin exchanges rather than the bitcoin network

Of course! With bitcoin, nothing is the fault of bitcoin and always something else's fault. Bitcoin can never fail. It can only be failed.

[shawnz]

No. It just affords you the possibility of choosing a different set of risks, that's all. Please don't change my words to fit your idea of a cryptocurrency shill.

[scrumbledober]

wells fargo is much more akin to a bitcoin exchange than it is to the bitcoin network though...

[lenticular]

You need bitcoin exchanges for any kind of practical transaction. Not only that, people who don't keep their money on exchanges lose their coins all the time. It's just the worst store of value. It would be more practical to transact in wheat like the Sumerians did. Or just dollars.

This stuff just keeps on happening, but crypto folks always make some excuse as to why it's not actually a systemic problem.

[shawnz]

> You need bitcoin exchanges for any kind of practical transaction. Not only that, people who don't keep their money on exchanges lose their coins all the time.

OK, what's your point? Nobody claimed it was perfect, just that it happens to be immune to the particular failure mode which happened here. Can you accept that that is true?

> This stuff just keeps on happening, but crypto folks always make some excuse as to why it's not actually a systemic problem.

What "stuff"? People losing coins? People lose cash all the time, does that make it a "systemic problem" with cash? They are just different technologies with different trade-offs.

It's understandable that you hate the cryptocurrency community but that doesn't mean you need to deny every possible advantage of cryptocurrencies.

[perl4ever]

"it happens to be immune to the particular failure mode which happened here"

What exactly do you mean by "immune to the particular failure mode"? Is bitcoin immune to server or data center outages? Perhaps if you very narrowly limit which ones you are talking about to the bitcoin network per se.

[deevolution]

Its not immune, no system is absolutely immune to failure, but it is highly resillient because of the wide distribution of its nodes and the fact that each node carries a full copy of the ledger.

[deevolution]

Queue infinite stream of downvotes. News flash, you dont need an exchange to store or transact bitcoin!!! And people using exchanges should understand the risks associated with using a centralized service.

[perl4ever]

What do you mean by "need"? If you don't have an exchange you can trust, doesn't that make things worse, because you have to determine whether you can trust your counterparties and you have to secure your assets with your own resources?

Matt Levine wrote the other day: "...people think they don’t trust the traditional financial system, but in fact its most basic functionality—not forgetting where it put your money—is so reliable that people just keep assuming without evidence that the crypto system must work the same way.

Surely a big crypto exchange must have, like, systems, and lawyers, and more than one employee, so you can trust it, right? Wrong! If I ever buy Bitcoins I will keep them at Gemini, the Winklevoss twins’ exchange, just because I am absolutely sure there are two of them."

[deevolution]

The main argument here is about the resiliency of the bitcoin network. Whatever your talking about has nothing to do with it.