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mrbluze writes:
"An interesting blog post by Charles Hugh Smith on Why Banks Are Doomed: Technology and Risk.:
The funny thing about technology is that those threatened by fundamental improvements in technology attempt to harness it to save their industry from extinction. For example, overpriced colleges now charge thousands of dollars for nearly costless massively open online courses (MOOCs) because they retain a monopoly on accreditation (diplomas). Once students are accredited directly--an advancement enabled by technology--colleges' monopoly disappears and so does their raison d'etre.
The same is true of banks. Now that accounting and risk assessment are automated, and borrowers and owners of capital can exchange funds in transparent digital marketplaces, there is no need for banks. But according to banks, only they have the expertise to create riskless debt.
...
One last happy thought: technology cannot be put back in the bottle. The financial/banking sector wants to use technology to increase its middleman skim, but the technology that is already out of the bottle will dismantle the sector as a function of what technology enables: faster, better, cheaper, with greater transparency, fairness and the proper distribution of risk.
There may well be a place for credit unions and community banks in the spectrum of exchanges, but these localized, decentralized enterprises would be unable to amass dangerous concentrations of risk and political influence in a truly transparent and decentralized system of exchanges.
It's still early days, but can new electronic currencies such as Bitcoin become mainstream without the assent of governments?"
(Score: 2, Informative) by Daniel Dvorkin on Monday February 24 2014, @06:28PM
This is a hugely important point. Every self-educated person I've ever worked with has had huge gaps in their knowledge, and often been very defensive about it and unwilling to benefit from anyone else's "book-learning." And I'm not exempting myself from this; I started working as a DBA before I'd taken a single database course, and it took me a long time to get it through my head that yes, damn it, those professors with their fancy degrees and expensive textbooks actually knew a hell of a lot more about the subject than I did, and it would be greatly to my benefit to listen to them.
These days, I'm a bioinformaticist. We have to deal with this attitude all the time, from all sides--computer scientists, statisticians, and biologists are all terribly prone to assuming they can "pick up all they need to know" of the other disciplines with a bit of self-study. Those of us with formal training in all three know how incredibly foolish this is.
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