High availability is understood by anyone who has tried to do banking under a centralized system just to discover the website was down for what ever reason. This causes delays in transactions and requires trust by merchants and consumers alike. it also means we have a lot of reconciling of accounts. where when the network has a high availability transactions are reconciled with in minutes not " up to 10 business days" as what account holders experience today.
The best part of high availability of the network is you know with in minutes what your balance is and this is accomplished by thousands of freelance systems across the globe checking each others work. This is similar to proofreading and fact checking insuring the work passes the standards before accepted.