Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency Service Levels and Uptime

One area of cryptocurrency that does not receive much press is Network Uptime.

Traditional banks and financial institutions employ the huge NOCs (Network Operations Centres) and 24/7 round the clock staff to ensure the uptime the financial network. Despite huge infrastructure cost and maintenance, financial networks are often plagued by down times, schedule maintenance such as backups or software updates, or emergencies such as hacking.

Couple that with procedural delays, procedural errors, human errors which can take weeks to resolve and we have a potential nightmare scenario in wait time. While same bank transfers still work fairly efficiently, that is fairly useless in 2018 where customers can come from anywhere across the world and use various financial service providers. These does even not include transactions by regular citizens that happen to reside in a nation state under economic embargo.

The centralized architecture of these service providers necessitates that each transaction that is made gets the centralized permission of the "authority" that holds custody to your money. While these may work efficiently with fairly small groups of people, they quickly lose efficiency when the users goes above a few thousand.

Enter distributed money aka bitcoin. No centralized servers or authority figure. Decentralized miners and nodes ensure new transactions are transmitted across the network. Transaction data are replicated by the nodes and always ensures that no matter how bad part of the network gets, the transactions never disappear.

At the time of writing, the bitcoin network has been up 99.992252598% (http://bitcoinuptime.com/) since Jan 2009. That's almost 10 years of getting transactions completed without a complete shut down,... merely temporary slow downs in networks. Given that there isn't even a single Bitcoin office or complains department, nor somebody designated to restart the network if it all goes "pear-shaped", this is close to being a minor miracle to have a working "virtual bank" and "virtual money" running so efficiently.

So, very time a bank say that a particular transaction requires X working days/weeks or approval from a banker, remember that financial services without limits, or permission at sub 1 dollar fees are already possible. It's called bitcoin and the cryptocurrency gang.

As the saying goes "Time Is Money" and if that holds true, then lost of time is certainly loss of money.