| The weak point of the centralized bank is with z: The person that manages the bank. He has full control over all the balances of all the participants.<p>Is this really a problem of a bank that needs solving by building a distributed banking system? Generally, in the banking systems of today there is a dual control system that makes
it hard for a single person to have complete control.<p>I know this is a theoretical article but I've noticed quite a few ideas for "blockchain" banking and similar new systems recently.
They are interesting in theory but I'm not sure they are solving the right problems. I'd be interested to see some technology that can be implemented at banks today, in the real world.
I'm working on a similar system, but it's quite a bit simpler, can use national currencies, and does not have supernodes or Byzantine fault tolerance <a href="http://altheamesh.com/blog/universal-payment-channels/" rel="nofollow">http://altheamesh.com/blog/universal-payment-channels/</a><p>I haven't completely specified the routing part yet, but I think it will be quite easy to extend Babel to incorporate cost as a metric. Due to Babel's network size limitations, it won't work as a big bad global mesh, but should work well in the smaller mesh networks we see today.