A decentralised monetary network ensures that, by sitting outside of the evermore connected current financial infrastructure you can mitigate the risks of being element of it when things go wrong. The 3 main risks of a centralised monetary system which were highlighted consequently of the 2008 financial crisis are credit, liquidity and operational failure. In the US alone since 2008 there has been 504 bank failures as a result of insolvency, there being 157 in 2010 alone. Typically such a collapse does not jeopardize account holder's savings as a result of federal/national backing and insurance for the very first few hundred thousand dollars/pounds, the banks assets usually being absorbed by another financial institution nevertheless the impact of the collapse can cause uncertainty and short-term issues with accessing funds. Since a decentralised system like the Bitcoin network isn't influenced by a bank to facilitate the transfer of funds between 2 parties but rather relies on its thousands of users to authorise transactions it is more resilient to such failures, it having as much backups as you can find members of the network to make certain transactions continue to be authorised in case of 1 person in the network'collapsing'(see below) block chain software.
A bank do not need to fail however to impact on savers, operational I.T. failures such as for example the ones that recently stopped RBS and Lloyds'customers accessing their accounts for weeks can impact on one's capability to withdraw savings, these being a result of a 30-40 year old legacy I.T. infrastructure that is groaning under the strain of maintaining the growth of customer spending and deficiencies in investment in general. A decentralised system isn't reliant on this kind of infrastructure, it instead being on the basis of the combined processing power of its thousands of users which ensures the ability to scale up as necessary, a fault in just about any the main system not causing the network to grind to a halt blockchain database.
Liquidity is your final real danger of centralised systems, in 2001 Argentine banks froze accounts and introduced capital controls consequently of these debt crisis, Spanish banks in 2012 changed their small print to permit them to block withdrawals over a specific amount and Cypriot banks briefly froze customer accounts and used as much as 10% of individual's savings to simply help pay off the National Debt blockchain technology.
As Jacob Kirkegaard, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics told the New York Times on the Cyrpiot example, "What the deal reflects is that being an unsecured or even secured depositor in euro area banks is never as safe as it used to be." In a decentralised system payment occurs without a bank facilitating and authorising the transaction, payments only being validated by the network where you can find sufficient funds, there being no 3rd party to stop a transaction, misappropriate it or devalue the quantity one holds.
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