With the current failure of Silicon Valley Bank, and Credit Suisse, there has been a lot of analysis on who is responsible for the failure of these banks. Is it the bank, central banks, regulators, or auditors? There is a percentage of each body at fault regarding proper governance, regulation, and what banks and financial institutions should do to ensure they are healthy.
This feels very deja vu, very 2018 when we saw the subprime mortgage crisis, especially in September with the collapse of Lehmen Brothers, there were all the same conversations about who was at fault.
So how is this related to Blockchain?
Interestingly, the inventors of Blockchains 2018’s purpose for creating the technology was to prevent banking failures like what we see today by subverting the banking system and capital markets – including monetary policy. (See page 1 of the original Blockchain whitepaper here). With cryptocurrency and Bitcoin being more of the focus, we sometimes lose the reason for their existence.
This isn’t necessarily about Blockchain but what the inventors of Blockchain were trying to do when he/she/they released the whitepaper on Blockchain. This is interesting to revisit today.