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Microsoft, Intel, banks and others form enterprise blockchain alliance
- schoen 10y agoSo there were a couple of articles pointing out that blockchains are much worse than other kinds of databases in almost every way, except that they let mutually-distrusting parties maintain an append-only consensus without a trusted arbiter. It's not clear to me that most corporations that do business with each other are "mutually-distrusting" in the radical cypherpunk sense, since they often use trusted arbiters and intermediaries with great success and have deep investments in the legal system. I can think of different examples of mutually-distrusting parties that can benefit from a decentralized append-only ledger in various ways, but large corporations in their business dealings with one another don't seem to match. (They aren't anonymous with each other, they have repeat dealings and reputation, they don't have a strong incentive to defraud each other, they're subject to the same governments' jurisdictions, they have access to dispute-resolution mechanisms that they can readily invoke and whose fairness they generally respect, they already have pretty good mechanisms for enforcing most contracts that they care to make, they're already reliant on trusted intermediaries for many purposes, and they're mostly not ideologically or even very practically reluctant to allow governments to make authoritative decisions about their right to engage in particular transactions.) How will blockchains help them, compared to centralized or merely distributed databases?
- mtgx 10y agoWhat exactly would Intel's role in this be?