[jokoon]

> But the largest sums were stolen by hacking into a bank’s accounting systems and briefly manipulating account balances. Using the access gained by impersonating the banking officers, the criminals first would inflate a balance — for example, an account with $1,000 would be altered to show $10,000. Then $9,000 would be transferred outside the bank. The actual account holder would not suspect a problem, and it would take the bank some time to figure out what had happened.

Sounds like a badly designed system. Usually a bookkeeping system should only accept additions and subtractions, not have direct access to the amount number. Those additions and subtractions should be versionned. It might take a lot of resource and computing power to track that many accounts, but in my opinions, if google, the NSA and amazon have big datacenters, banks should too. I don't think they really have the proper infrastructure to secure something so important like account balance. I even think the government should invest money in securing those systems and places, since it's a nerve of the economy.

So either use up to date computing methods, or hire more accountant and use paper instead.

[ukigumo]

This is actually a very good point. If only there was a system of public ledger for fiat currency :-)

[jokoon]

stop it right there with bitcoin. there are advantages to centralization.

[ukigumo]

Yes there are, I'm not advocating for a one solution fits all.