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A common critique that I hear from my friends who are not in the crypto space revolves around blockchain outages. Of course, these are issues that have crippled networks and need to be addressed and prevented at all costs. However, people fail to see that in traditional finance and other industries, outages serve as the equivalent of a blockchain outage. A prime example of this occurred just this week however it did not seem to gather or maintain the attention that it really should have.
On Tuesday shortly after the New York Stock Exchanged opened roughly 200 stocks were halted from trading. Now with over 2,000 companies listed on the exchange that might not sound like a big deal but it really really was. Major companies were impacted including Morgan Stanley, Verizon, AT&T, Nike, and McDonald's among others. Not being able to sell your asset is a huge deal and in certain cases could completely ruin someone's net worth.
Now reading that does it sound pretty familiar to blockchain outages? At least to me, it does as it freezes you with your assets preventing you from doing anything while they could be skyrocketing or crashing to the earth. In this situation outside or third party/parties control your fate. Now with the markets, the entire disruption was fixed by 10 AM with most of the affected fixed within the first 15 minutes. That being said they still have not fully disclosed what happened beyond a technical issue that lead to volatility which lead to stocks being halted because of this volatility giving people another prime example of why DeFi is designed much better since so much of the code and even exploits are made publicly available.
Is it exactly like a blockchain outage no because blockchains are a different sort of thing but examples like this are widespread and are a lot more similar than people would care to admit. When the Federal Aviation Administration had a computer glitch a couple of weeks ago flights across the US were grounded for hours just like transactions would be. Getting the system back up, much like when rebooting the blockchain, took time and wasn't a light switch flip moment as the system was eased into it.
While crypto is in many ways different from other things it also shares similarities with others for better or for worse and I think that is something that both pro and anti-crypto people need to remember.
Please know I am not a financial advisor and make sure you do your own research! If you enjoyed this article and would like to support me further below are a few referral links that if you used when signing up I would appreciate it! Also, follow me on Twitter @Cje95_
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