> I could think of several problems, mainly around trust. And this is the problem that blockchain+proof-of-work solves so well. Financial companies are howeve

> I could think of several problems, mainly around trust. And this is the problem that blockchain+proof-of-work solves so well. Financial companies are however different beasts. They are not and do not want to be anonymous. While they don't fully trust each other, they do have significant trust in each other and they are typically regulated by a central authority. The blockchain-based solutions advocated by R3 seem to have a number of services that must be trusted by all participants, including time stamping. Traditionally when coordination has been required between the banks (e.g. fast clearing solutions for retail banks), a new company is created that is joint owned by the members, and is therefore trusted enough by the members to run the centralized database. To avoid the single-point of failure aspect you can run a distributed database across multiple nodes. I still haven't heard a good explanation of why solutions like those aren't adequate.