in modern banks money is just a number in a database, right? What stops the bank owners from just adding an amount to a saldo of an account?

Question

in modern banks money is just a number in a database, right? What stops the bank owners from just adding an amount to a saldo of an account?

In: Technology

Answer 1

In a sense, a bank’s whole job is to keep proper track of those numbers in the database. The bank is only allowed to keep track of our money because everyone trusts the bank to do its job properly. If the bank makes an invalid change to the database and somebody notices, the bank will lose the trust of its customers and people will start taking their money out of the bank and moving it to another one. So, banks have a strong motivation to not mess with the numbers, or to at least seem like they aren’t messing with the numbers.