The United States Federal Reserve System (the Fed) reported a technical outage that disrupted the operation of a number of services for several hours. Participants in the cryptocurrency community seized the moment to point to the advantages of the Bitcoin blockchain.
According to the Fed’s website, an “operational error” affected the wire transfer system as well as several services of the central bank and government agencies. At the time of writing, the services were operating normally.
In the cryptocurrency community, there was a rush to point to Bitcoin’s resilience to hacks and outages.
I always thought #Bitcoin will end the Fed but they actually seem to be doing just fine on that by themselves
— Ben Kaufman (@_benkaufman) February 24, 2021
“I always thought Bitcoin would end the Fed, but it seems they’re handling it themselves,” wrote a Twitter user.
Participants noted that the Bitcoin network has been operating uninterrupted for 99.9861% of the time since its inception. In that period there were only two incidents in 2010 and 2013, during which the network did not function for a total of 14 hours 47 minutes.
The #Bitcoin network has been functional for
99.9861132335 %
of the time since its inception on Jan 3 2009 02:54:25 GMThttps://t.co/tIokgghvxu
— Alejandro De La Torre (@bitentrepreneur) February 24, 2021
Castle Island Ventures founder Nick Carter recalled comments by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who previously described the first cryptocurrency inefficient for transactions.
Janet this seems inefficient.. thoughts? https://t.co/0jGtkLBF9a
— nic carter (@nic__carter) February 24, 2021
The community also drew attention to Yellen’s remarks and the Fed outage.
A short, inefficient story: pic.twitter.com/559zrDbw54
— Documenting Bitcoin 📄 (@DocumentingBTC) February 24, 2021
As noted, James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said that Bitcoin can compete with gold, not the US dollar.
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