> The reason banks and big financial companies are interested in it is not for its speculative value. They are interested in the fact that it is both decentrali

> The reason banks and big financial companies are interested in it is not for its speculative value. They are interested in the fact that it is both decentralized and immutable. None of the blockchain projects or proposals being worked on by enterprise financial institutions are decentralized. A decentralized ledger is conceptually antithetical to a small group of organizations which trust each other and want to retain control over the shared ledger. It can be immutable, but for that matter I don't really think it's immutable in the same sense as a decentralized, permissionless ledger is. The organizations in charge of the blockchain can create a hard fork, which everyone participating with the organizations will have to abide by, because the blockchain is not decentralized. In fact, what we actually have is a consortium of companies deploying distributed database structures and calling them blockchains. I'm sure there is a legitimately new innovation that can emerge from this sort of blockchain, but it won't be decentralization or immutability.