Cryptocurrency Competing With Visa
This week, the adoption of cryptocurrency and decentralized network was strengthened as Visa payments through Europe were interrupted, making it impossible for thousands of people to make transactions.
Reports from the BBC stated that people were unable to pay for goods and services and in some cases, people were left humiliated as they left restaurants unable to pay for their orders.
Visa News Europe tweeted regarding the issue and the comment thread immediately turn into a topic of discussion about the importance of cryptocurrency.
On a daily basis, Visa’s centralized payment processing service normally handles 150 million transactions. Similar to other centralized services, Visa operates a select group of private servers which offers a single point of failure when likened to a decentralized network such as Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
Generally, decentralized systems operate on nodes shared in various location, in most cases internationally, and the system becomes more secure and little chances of failure as additional nodes become part of the network. Since its launch in 2009, Bitcoin has been 99.99 percent operational, and blockchain networks ideally can be operated limitless without interruption.
The downside to it though is the scaling problems faced by blockchain networks. The network needs all nodes to update for the transaction to be cross-checked, and with numerous transactions to be processed and in most cases to be permanently recorded, things can be slow creating longer waiting times and higher transaction cost.
Yet, over the last few years, there has been an increase in adoption of blockchain technology and innovation in the space. Last, yet, twelve out of 26 major Chinese banks adopted blockchain technology with other leading financial institutions following this trend and low-cost, real-time cross-border payments being facilitated between currencies and countries.
Huge sums of money are being raised for industry projects and state-operated facilities have been created in several countries for blockchain survey and improvement.
