Does anyone trust back office developers at major banks to implement a cohesive, industrywide blockchain-based replacement for 30 or 40 years of settlement and clearance technology?
I sure as hell don't, and I work in the space: we'll get too distracted writing AbstractBlockchainFactoryFactories to do right by the problem.
"trust" is too strong of a word here (do you trust that your bank has their act together 100%?), but I don't see how these developers would be less trustworthy than the bitcoin core dev team or ripple labs etc etc.
If anything, the banks and financial industry in general are reasonably rigid and not very interested in chasing "the next best thing" just for the sake of it.
A very obvious outcome of this approach is the ridiculous amount of time it takes to clear an ACH transaction domestically for example.
I guess my point is when it comes to implementing changes the banks are no less trustworthy then most of the other players in the financial industry.
...the ridiculous amount of time it takes to clear an ACH transaction domestically for example.
My impression is that this has more to do with banks' desire to book transactions at just the right time (e.g. to maximize fees charged or minimize leverage ratio) than with technical limitations.
ACH flow is basically a set of batches executed by the parties involved in a sequential manner, taking about a day each with cutoff times sometimes as early as 2PM EST to boot. This system dates to the 70s.
Mexican SPEI system for example is almost real time (they too have a cut off time I think it's 5 PM EST).
1) Innovation of bitcoin is proof of work, not a chain of blocks.
2) credit crunch for unicorns is troubling. we should all be worried about where this can lead.
> Innovation of bitcoin is proof of work, not a chain of blocks.
Proof of work was invented in the late 90s by Adam Back. The consensus algorithm using proof of work and a blockchain is what Bitcoin brought to the world.
> Proof of work was invented in the late 90s by Adam Back. The consensus algorithm using proof of work and a blockchain is what Bitcoin brought to the world.
Wikipedia disagrees:
> The concept may have been first presented by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in a 1993 journal article.
I'm interested to hear Digital Asset's explanation of why a blockchain is an appropriate technical tradeoff in an industry with a central clearinghouse.
I'm surprised DTC is pushing this. If it catches on, DTC becomes obsolete. DTC is a centralized clearing house not tied to any single bank. That's the traditional way to get a combined ledger between mistrustful parties.
Maybe that's why DTC wants to control the technology. What they're apparently doing first is applying a distributed ledger to some kinds of big, reasonably infrequent trades that are currently a headache.
>centralized clearing house not tied to any single bank. That's the traditional way to get a combined ledger between mistrustful parties.
somehow reminded about opening pages of Cryptonomicon describing an alternative to centralized clearing house. I think that the new block-chain tech being developed by the banks would look and feel surprisingly pretty much the same as the one described by NS :)
> DLT may be able to provide regulators with visibility into the trading portfolios of swaps counterparties that they lacked during the financial crisis and that Dodd-Frank mandated.
Err, except, as you said, Dodd-Frank mandated that visibility, and banks have been reporting their swap portfolios for around 3 years.
These non-work blockchains are really scammy. Anyone around here have a journaled database that's not selling? Call it a blockchain, and wall street will open its wallets.
It seems that they don't really need blockchains (meaning fault tolerant consensus algorithms). I'm doubtful that these networks would be truly open, that they would allow untrusted partners on it. Auditing and logging should be enough.
What they really need is peer to peer protocol standards for clearing. "Blockchain" seems to be enabling a discussion on this.
Algorithms/protocols to solve the consensus problem in the presence of arbitrary "Byzantine" faults have been around for a long time (since the 1980s, at least e.g. [1]), and they keep getting better. Make the network closed-access (i.e. where the owners of all nodes are known/approved), and voila, you've also got resistance to Sybil attacks.
The end result is something with blockchain characteristics, but at lower computational cost than Proof-of-Work. Maybe that's not something everyone wants, but banks do.
The article explains why this is not true: back-end financial technology is boring and banks weren't willing to spend enough money or risk on upgrading them until overwhelming blockchain blockchain blockchain hype pushed them over the edge.
* Better BFT algorithms (e.g. lower network load, more reliable in practice)
* Faster computers
* Better computer networks
* Cheaper storage
* Better software development and deployment practices (faster, more reliable, more secure)
* and yes, the recent interest in BFT spurred by Bitcoin.
For example, the original algorithms had network load that was exponential in the number of nodes, O(2^N). Some newer non-POW algorithms are O(N*polylog(N)).
According to coindesk;
"Digital Asset said Hyperledger includes a "prototype implementation" of the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus module, which would serve as an alternative to the mining process." [2]
I sure as hell don't, and I work in the space: we'll get too distracted writing AbstractBlockchainFactoryFactories to do right by the problem.