We do know who owns the stock. That's how dividends are distributed.
The desire to have instantaneous trades is why the transfer of funds follows the agreement to trade. The system actually works pretty well; first you trade, then you settle the trade. It just works on a T+2 basis.
> people like to ridicule Bitcoin for taking an hour to settle
What is the dollar value of bitcoin transactions per day, versus the dollar value of stock trades per day? Nasdaq alone trades something like $300B/day.
>The desire to have instantaneous trades is why the transfer of funds follows the agreement to trade. The system actually works pretty well;
If what you were saying is true, we wouldn't be the problem under discussion. The fact that it's not true is why we do. If we could have such certainty in the moment over who owned what stock, then we wouldn't need to put up collateral to hedge against the possible failure-to-deliver.
>>people like to ridicule Bitcoin for taking an hour to settle
>What is the dollar value of bitcoin transactions per day, versus the dollar value of stock trades per day? Nasdaq alone trades something like $300B/day.
The question is about latency, not throughput. That is, Nasdaq might throw up $300B/day worth of tentative transfers, but you still have to wait 2 days to "take the assets and run".
And two-day latency is still bad when, unlike Bitcoin, you can take advantage of centralization and lack of anonymity.
According to [0], Bitcoin has a volume of ~54B in the past 24 hours (from posting). So it’s not the same, but it’s a damn massive amount. It’s less than an order of magnitude.
The desire to have instantaneous trades is why the transfer of funds follows the agreement to trade. The system actually works pretty well; first you trade, then you settle the trade. It just works on a T+2 basis.
> people like to ridicule Bitcoin for taking an hour to settle
What is the dollar value of bitcoin transactions per day, versus the dollar value of stock trades per day? Nasdaq alone trades something like $300B/day.