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Nationwide customers 'bank cards suddenly stopped working' after technical glitch

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FURIOUS Nationwide customers had their payments declined and were locked out of their accounts when the bank's system went down yesterday.

From Nationwide customers 'bank cards suddenly stopped working' after technical glitch

The system went down. But what if there was no system to go down? Imagine that each ATM is a node in a shared ledger. Suppose a bank has a million customers, and each customer’s transaction record is 1Kb. A balance, last few transactions, that sort of thing. No need to store the whole transaction history in the ledger. That’s 1Gb. Maybe 10Gb for all of the bank customers in the UK. I have a flash drive in my bag with 128Gb on it and it cost like $50. Now, when someone draws money from an ATM the ledger is updated over a few minutes at all of the other ATMs (remember, ATMs are doing nothing most of the time). If an ATM goes down, so what? Just go to another one. When an ATM comes back, the ledger will update.

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