Topic: Technically centralised systemic failure looks like this (Read 1585 times)

Offshore tax haven accounts are tax havens because of the jurisdiction in which they are established.  Bitcoins are subject to no particular jurisdiction (at least in practice); so they are just as good as those offshore accounts.

The difference is that it's hard for us non-millionaires to get hold of one of these tax haven accounts.  It isn't hard for us to buy a USB stick and put a Bitcoin private key on it.

Bitcoin doesn't solve the problem of laundering your ill-gotten gains (should that be what you want), but then neither do tax havens.  If you've got some money and you want to put it out of sight of your local government, Monaco might work; but then so might Bitcoin.

It doesn't, it just lets you get rid of the goods quicker when the cops bust in.

Please say more.  How does bitcoin provide any kind of different tax haven then paper money already did? 

Any co-incidence that this is a state owned bank?

Well maybe not so funny for the 12 million customers who's accounts have been frozen for almost a week now .... I'm just wondering if the unsaid words in all these articles on the RBS trainwreck are "security vulnerability"?

Having millions of mobile devices suddenly able to have some kind of comms with the core banking systems sounds like a nightmare to me ... although I have no way of knowing how they are actually doing it. Makes one wonder though if the vulnerability that RBS has just discovered is in fact already out there, and waiting to do its thing, in all the other Smartphone banking apps that have been rushed to market recently?

That's funny.  Rushing to compete with Bitcoin crashed their ATMs.

I just wonder .... the banks are rushing the Smart-phone apps out to leverage their brands and keep ahead of technologies like bitcoin ... has bitcoin phone app threat pushed some of them over the edge, technically speaking? (This guy seems to think so).

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/saving/article-2163048/NatWest-RBS-banking-problems-Millions-wages-meltdown-enters-second-day.html

'More technical problems lie ahead for ALL British banks'

Last week, RBS-NatWest launched a mobile banking app that lets people to withdraw money from cash machines using their smartphone.

It is the latest bank to offer such technology as the industry moves towards making smartphones digital wallets.

But the rush to offer new technology may come at a price.

Experts warned that customers of UK banks would increasingly face such problems because of the rush to deliver new and evermore sophisticated services.

Daoud Fakhri, senior analyst at consultancy Datamonitor Financial Services, said: ‘This episode is emblematic of wider problems facing the banking sector as a whole.

'Many providers, being early adopters of IT systems when the technology was still in its infancy, have been left saddled with inflexible core systems that are often several decades old, and that are increasingly unable to cope with the demands being placed on them.

‘The growing expectations of consumers around online and mobile banking means that the tensions between the provision of ever more sophisticated services and the capability of core systems to satisfy these demands are close to breaking point, and this increases the likelihood of episodes such as the NatWest mishap happening again.’

Bitcoin gives the common man access to a tax haven, previously the domain of the rich.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/banking/9351741/Natwest-glitch-RBS-chief-Stephen-Hester-faces-pressure-to-explain-fault-to-public.html

just because you can doesn't mean you should. Centralising the technical systems of the monetary system, to align with the politically centralised banking system was a fatal flaw ... they were doomed to failure technically, but that will inevitably lead to their consequent economic failure, which was actually baked into the cake when the political system centralised banking and outlawed financial failure of any of the components.