Why are bank transactions not instant?
"If you want your bank to pay $1 to a beneficiary Bob, then the service (no matter how implemented) needs to result in Bob's bank saying to Bob ""Hey, I owe you $1"".    The usual way how this is done consists of two parts - your bank needs to somehow tell Bob's bank ""hey guys, do us a favor and please give Bob $1 with a message from the sender"", and your bank needs to convince the other bank that they'll pay for (cover) that. This is the main source for the delays in international payments - there are thousands of banks, and most of possible pairs have no legal contact between themselves whatsoever, no bilateral agreements, no trust and no reasonable enforcement mechanism for small claims. If I'm Bob's bank, then a random bank from anywhere from Switzerland to Nigeria can send me an instruction ""give Bob $1, we'll make it up for you"", the SWIFT network is a common way of doing this. However, most likely I'm going to give Bob the money only after I receive the funds somehow, which means that they have given the money to some institution I work with. For payments within a single country, it often is a centralized exchange or a central bank, and the payment speed is then determined by the details of that particular single payment network - e.g. UK Faster Payments or the various systems used in USA. For international payments, it may require a chain of multiple intermediaries (correspondent banks) - for example, a payment of $1mm from Kazakhstan to China will likely involve the Kazakhstan bank asking their main correspondent in USA (some major bank such as Chase JPMorgan) to give the money to the relevant chinese bank's correspondent in USA (say, Citi) to then give the money to that chinese bank to then give the money to the actual recipient. Each of those steps can happen because those entities have bilateral agreements, trust and accounts with each other; and each of those steps generally takes time and verification. If you want all payments to happen instantly, then you need all institutions to join a single binding payment system. It's not as easy as it sounds, as it is a nightmare of jurisdiction - for example, if you'd want me (as Bob's bank) to credit Bob instantly, then the system needs to provide solid guarantees that I would get paid even if (a) the payer institution changes its mind, made a mistake or intentional fraud; (b) the payer institution goes insolvent; (c) the system provider gets insolvent. Providing such guarantees is expensive, they need to be backed by multi-billion capital, and they're unrealistic to enforce across jurisdictions (e.g. would an Iranian bank get recourse if some funds got blocked because of USA sanctions). The biggest such project as far as I know is SEPA, across most of Europe. Visa and MasterCard networks perform the same function - a merchant gets paid by the CC network even if the payer can't pay his CC bill or the paying bank goes insolvent." It is a rather complex system, but here is a rough summary. Interbank tranfers ultimately require a transfer of reserves at the central bank. As a concrete example, the bank of england system is the rtgs. Only the clearing banks and similar (e.g. bacs) have access to rtgs. You can send a chaps payment fairly quickly, but that costs. Chaps immediately triggers an rtgs transfer once the sending bank agrees and so you can be certain that the money is being paid.  Hence its use for large amounts. Bacs also sits on the rtgs but to keep costs down it batches tranfers up. Because we are talking about bank reserve movements, checks have to be in place and that can take time. Furthermore the potential for fraud is higher than chaps since these are aggregrated transactions a layer removed, so a delay reduces the chance of payment failing after apparently being sent. Faster payments is a new product by bacs that speeds up the bacs process by doing a number of transfers per day. Hence the two hour clearing. For safety it can only be used for up to 10k. Second tier banks will hold accounts with clearing banks so they are another step down. Foreign currency transfers require the foreign Central Bank reserve somewhere, and so must be mediated by at least one clearing bank in that country. Different countries are at different stages in their technology.  Uk clearing is 2h standard now but US is a little behind I believe.  Much of Europe is speeding up. Rather like bitcoin clearing, you have a choice between speed and safety. If you wait you are more certain the transaction is sound and have more time to bust the transfer.
My bank (USAA) moves money to and from a USAA brokerage account instantly. They also have instant transfers from their money market funds to checking, savings, and brokerage. It takes the 3 days to go to another institution, though. I'd say it's a limitation of your bank. Every bank I've ever used had instant transfers between accounts at the same bank. "All the other answers here are correct, but I'll add one more perspective. I am a business architect at one of the world's largest retail banks. Every day I experience the frustration of trying to get large-scale corporate IT to do anything, so I feel that your question is just one facet of the wider question: ""why are banks so old and busted?"" While it's true that the cost of online, redundant, performant, secure data storage is significantly higher than you anticipate in the question, it should still be well within the capacity of a large enterprise. The true cost is the cost of change. Nothing at a bank is a green field development. Everything is a bolt-on to existing systems. Any change brings the risk that existing functionality will be affected, therefore vast schemes of regression testing (largely manually executed) spring up around even the most trivial developments. Costs scale exponentially with the number of platforms affected (often utterly distinct, decades-old, incompatible platforms that have arisen out of historical mergers and acquisitions). Only statutory, revenue-generating and critical maintenance change is approved. Any form of cost-cutting that increases risk is quickly extinguished. This is because when things go wrong, IT get blamed by their business colleagues. This is because the business colleagues in turn get blamed by the regulators, the media, the customers, and the public at large. Who doesn't cuss their bank when the ATM is unavailable? The bank's IT organization develops a kind of management sclerosis, risk averse in the extreme. Banks can't ship a beta version and patch it later. This ultra-low-innovation approach is a direct result of market and regulatory forces. If you were happy with a bank account that played fast and loose with your money the way Facebook plays with your data, then banking would be much cheaper, much more innovative, and much riskier. To get back to your specific question, some banks actually do offer a much longer back catalog of transactions for download (usually only a few key fields of each transaction though), and the ones that don't most likely don't see it as a revenue generating selling point, and it therefore falls above their innovation appetite." Your quote: There's about 10 trillion in gold  and about 2.8 trillion of US cash  in the world. Neither of these is anywhere large enough to be used for all the transactions in the world.  So how was it commercial banks could lend like crazy for home mortgages??  M1 remaind constant throughout the decade and years , if frac multiplier effect was the cause for m2, why wasn't it until the 2000s that m2 became exponential?   Commercial Banks able to create credit and lend out of thin air to customers thanks to deregulation that caused m2 to explode.  They didn't need no FED.  They didin't need no reserves.  They were able to act regardless of the FED.  The FED responded to them, instead of the other way around.    Before deregulation banks didn't bother creating too much credit loans coz it was too dangerous, they were mostly utilty banks.   After deregulation, creation of exotic derivatives, low interest rates, and high speed internet globalized digital trading,  they went crazy creating credit out of thin air coz it wasn't dangerous because they could sell the home loans. Also people don't disable overdraft. Or after they get hit with the fee, they don't change their behavior.   Although that being said, I never balance my checkbook. But then again I never use debit cards and I usually only ever have 1 check outstanding at a time. Assuming neither one charges a fee and you are talking about automated non-cash, non-check transactions: Withdrawal is slightly better if you are 100% sure you have the money (or better yet, twice the money) to cover it.  It puts more incentive on the bank that is responsible for the act to do it correctly, because they will then be the bank holding the money.  It also creates an added check because there is no possibility of having an error in transfer information result in sending your money to the wrong account.  (This is unlikely anyway, but not impossible depending on the bank and interface). Deposit may be slightly better if you are not, or if you are concerned about technical foul-ups at the bank.  Depending on the bank, a deposit with insufficient funds may be cancelled rather than going through and then being cancelled, which could result in various banking fees (returned item fees, overdraft fees, etc...).   If there is a technical foul-up during a withdrawal, you run the risk of having banks get confused--I know of a case where it took a major bank months to fix a withdrawal transaction that was denied the second time when they activated it twice, but the account balance mistakenly showed an extra thousand dollars for the duration. "That's bullshit. If money is ""created"" when bank makes a loan, then money is ""destroyed"" when customer repays the loan. Eventually these two processes even out, so money can be ""created"" only temporarily.     You can roll over the loans only to a certain extent, at some point chicken must come home to roost.     Current cycle of credit expansion just continues for so long, people lose common sense view and come up with nonsense ""theories""." The request to block the money is made by the Party who sells the product. Based on this request the Bank blocks the funds. Subsequently the Party who sold the product makes a charge against this block. Just to give an easy example; So in the online train booking there are multiple messages sent between the Bank and SNCF. Something has gone wrong. It looks like the message from Bank sending back the Block reference number to SNCF has not reached. So as per Bank there is a Block and as per SNCF there is no block. Keep chasing SNCF to issue a letter so that you can send it to the Bank and get the Block removed. Typically the Blocks by the Bank are for a period of 30 days and if there is no charge against that block it automatically gets reversed.