I don't like Blockchains mostly but the technology of the Blockchain here is not irrelevant, it is a way to use peer to peer liquidity. That is there is no need for a central entity to have liquidity in many different circuits because you can trade with other coin holders directly in many different exchanges.

Sort of like banks use customer money to offer loans to avoid the need of centralised liquidity.

The Blockchain technology is important to allow different exchanges to interact with each other in ways that I suspect would be not super legal through a central entity.

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wrs 6 days ago | parent [-]

Running a database does not require liquidity.

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afiori 5 days ago | parent [-]

Running a database with no liquidity does not allow you to actually transfer funds.

When A sends money to B both have an expectation that B is able to access such money through normal monetary systems like: seeing their bank balance go up, withdraw it as cash, or transfer it again to C which will have a similar recursive set of expectations.

Unless your database is the de facto central banck for the currency A and B use you will have to convice B's monetary system to believe B now has more money. The simples and almost only way to do that is to pay the appropriate price in a currency they like.

Which requires liquidity.

As an example if you wanted to install a bitcoin ATM with withdrawl* in a train station (or anywhere else) you would need liquidity in whatever currency the user want to withdraw.

* I suppose you could withdrawn bitcoin by giving out fresh wallets with the sum or by simply transfering it.

	▲	wrs 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Why should a database need to transfer funds? Bitcoin doesn’t transfer funds, it’s just a shared ledger of what funds have been transferred. Lots of banks use Oracle to record fund transfers, but Oracle doesn’t transfer any funds.