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JP Morgan rolls out first US bank-backed cryptocurrency to transform paymentsd
- dfischer 8y agoThis tweet from CRW: https://twitter.com/ProfFaustus/status/1096018468858667008 https://twitter.com/ProfFaustus/status/1096018468858667008 I don't have too much to say besides I'm curious how things will develop around this over the coming months.
- barnbuilder 8y agoWhen that individual says anything truthful or delivers on any of his promises, it will be the first time. Until then feel free to ignore the troll.
- c_r_w 8y agoThat guy is CSW. I am CRW. I swear he uses my email address to sign up for golf clubs.
- osrec 8y agoI don't fully see how Dimon can back this, yet be so against Bitcoin. Based on the article, JP seems to be essentially building a distributed ledger, not too dissimilar to the one underpinning bitcoin (apart from the distinct possibility that it will not be quite as open as bitcoin). Lol, I guess it's only worthwhile when they do it?
- basch 8y agoThe difference between a type of invention and a specific implementation is huge. This coin is all about JPMorgan, as a central institution backing and controlling it, being what establishes trust. This is a distributed database, not distributed trust and consensus.
- osrec 8y agoWell, then perhaps they have misunderstood their own needs. If they want to be "the" central party, why can't they just do this with a simple database, rather than issuing coins and whatnot?
- tyingq 8y agoThis is my biggest issue with typical proposals for a blockchain. If the proposal requires trusting a central authority, it's just a ledger, and might as well be a database. Less complicated, faster, albeit not as cool on your resume.
- osrec 8y agoYeah, just looked up Umar Farooq, the guy heading this. He's ex-McKinsey... Says it all really.
- kickopotomus 8y agoBecause they have been doing that for decades. The issue is that the tech used is relatively slow, antiquated, and expensive. Additionally, the transactions that the coins would be used for are complex and fit nicely with the ledger model of blockchain tech. As pointed out in the article, they are going to initially use their coin on a trial basis to compare it to business-as-usual.
- mwerty 8y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzLazqmVC3s&t=3m35s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzLazqmVC3s&t=3m35s
- osrec 8y agoWow, he's very blasé about the whole topic... Yet his prior opinion was so strong.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> I don't fully see how Dimon can back this, yet be so against Bitcoin Lots of trading happens around banks being asked by customers to provide exposure to stupid things. If your ambition is to be a big bank to everyone, you’ll have to learn to accommodate such requests. Being able to say “I’ll help you do this, but I don’t recommend it” is part of the trade.
- momentmaker 8y agoI think it was JP Morgan himself who said this (paraphrasing): "There are two reasons for any action: the reason that sounds good and the real reason."
- Nursie 8y ago> I don't fully see how Dimon can back this, yet be so against Bitcoin. Pegged value, privately controlled, governance and oversight built in, no PoW, no speculators. Effectively all it has in common with BTC is the ability to send payments from one account to another.
- osrec 8y agoYou're not wrong. Looks like they're just trying to hop on the buzzword bandwagon...
- andirk 8y agoDimon will be against any competitor. These aren't philosophers or even honest people. Keep that in mind when listening to them. I include btc shills in this as well. They have an obvious angle that is not influenced by morals, truth, etc.
- deweller 8y agoIn the early days of the internet, companies like Microsoft and Lotus Notes invested in corporation-controlled private messaging applications instead of using things like email and the world wide web. But in the end the benefits of open standards and interoperability made public networks more useful than a walled garden. JPM thinks a centrally controlled digital currency is better than a public currency. Of course there are benefits to JPM in controlling this currency. The interesting thing to watch is whether public and interoperable digital currencies prove to be more valuable and useful than a centrally-controlled one.
- herval 8y agoAt least on messaging, we mostly swung back to private protocols and centralization (Whatsapp, Slack, Messenger, etc) - maybe email is the big exception and walled gardens always somehow “win”...
- thinkmassive 8y agoIt will be interesting to see how Matrix evolves as next generation federated chat.
- basch 8y ago>But in the end the benefits of open standards and interoperability made public networks more useful than a walled garden. The world has swung the other way. If I want restaurant reviews, I need yelp/tripadvisor/googlemaps/facebook to access each database of reviews. To order a delivery meal I need ubereats/doordash/grubhub/postmates/amazon. To compare taxi prices, I need to open uber and lyft, and to rent a scooter I need a new app in each city. To send a message I need fbmessenger/whatsapp/skype/hangouts. Even Match Group keeps its subsidiaries as silos, instead of allowing interop. It probably actually INCREASES peoples desire to hop around the different products, knowing they dont work together. If gmail and outlook didnt work, id be more likely to have both. Open standards and interoperability made public networks more useful, but now that the networks are in place, and access is ubiquitous, walled gardens can spring up and dominate MUCH faster than distributed protocols.
- woah 8y agoWhere’s the HN crowd demanding to know why JP Morgan didn’t just use git?
- bob_theslob646 8y ago"While J.P. Morgan's Jamie Dimon has bashed bitcoin as a "fraud," the bank chief and his managers have consistently said blockchain and regulated digital currencies held promise." They are only doing so because it saves them a ton of money.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> They are only doing so because it saves them a ton of money This is less about cost savings and more about lock-in and liability. Customers can move their money around by wire or ACH with anyone. They can only do it with JPM coin through JPMorgan. With such treasury services, moreover, fraud is a big cost centre. A cryptocurrency might be a good way to shift liability for unwanted transactions away from the bank and onto customers.
- bob_theslob646 8y agoYou are correct, but there is a tremendous incentive for them to save on costs by using their own blockchain. "The blockchain potential in financial services is huge, and has several applications which span across payments, capital markets, trade services, investment and wealth management, securities and commodities exchanges. Blockchain technology can be considered as one of the main drivers to achieve a substantial cost saving. According to a Santander FinTech study, distributed ledger technology could reduce financial services infrastructure cost between US$15 billion and $20 billion per annum by 2022, providing the possibility to decommission legacy systems and infrastructure and significantly reduce IT costs." https://www.pwc.com/m1/en/media-centre/articles/blockchain-new-tool-to-cut-costs.html https://www.pwc.com/m1/en/media-centre/articles/blockchain-n... https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cost-cutting-potential-of-blockchain-1520993100 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cost-cutting-potential-of-b... https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-banks-can-save-big-with-blockchain-2017-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-banks-can-save-big... https://www.globalcustodian.com/settlements-costs-fall-27-billion-2030-using-blockchain-research-finds/ https://www.globalcustodian.com/settlements-costs-fall-27-bi... https://www.ft.com/content/b6171016-171f-11e8-9e9c-25c814761640 https://www.ft.com/content/b6171016-171f-11e8-9e9c-25c814761...
- lostmsu 8y agoAny technical details? Is it a new currency or an ERC20 token? What is their proof mechanism?
- lettergram 8y agoI think the only reason this is legal are “cryptocurrencies are classified as commodity, not currency”. Banks can’t technically make their own currency, but commodities are okay. I see this eventually becoming a fairly serious issue with the fed, if this takes off.
- matt4077 8y agoContrary to libertarian paranoia, alternative currencies are perfectly legal, and neither the FED, nor the Feds, will come after you guns ablaze. Here’s Wikipedia on the topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_currency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_currency To which I would add airline miles, gift cards, and postage stamps. The distinction to commodities is only relevant for some questions around taxation, accounting, and investor protection.
- snr 8y agoI mean, sure why the hell not. You could write/buy/subscribe to a strongly consistent distributed cloud kv store system to do the same more efficiently, but knock yourself out.
- lebed2045 8y agoit's a false statement to call it a cryptocurrency. They simply set a permission private ledger for institutional usage. It has nothing to do with decentralized cryptocurrency with stable price, like MakerDao (or SableUnit)
- Lucadg 8y agoThat's the intranet of money as opposed to the internet of money.
- lordnacho 8y agoThis is what being all marketing and no substance looks like. What big companies think is cool and innovative is always several years behind what actually is cool and innovative. And they always miss the point, in this case what the idea of crypto is. But big companies are masters of shouting loudly, as in this case where JPMC's PR has gotten this story out in just about every major outlet. Whether this is anything beyond a PR exercise I don't know, I get the feeling there are some quite strong internal forces that will not be interested in actually using this. Someone I know works for a big 4 that is also roughly at this point in the delayed hype cycle. They are furiously selling blockchain solutions to everyone who will listen, and doing quite well at it. They did a firmwide review of internal skills recently, and amazingly there are zero staff who have any idea what a smart contract is. You wouldn't know if reading about them in the news, but they are getting paid millions and millions for various projects that are currently undeliverable.
- thatguyagain 8y agoDoes it have to be cool, though? If banks find a use case for blockchain technology, and they go ahead and implement it in some way so that it is only used by banks, how is that a missed point?
- Nursie 8y agoIt's not, in fact it would prove a point that seems to have been missed by the cryptocurrency community at large - even if blockchain does become useful, it seems unlikely that big banks or countries are going to start using the existing coins and enrich the current holders.
- madeofpalk 8y agoI would hope that a big bank is not chasing 'cool and shiny' things, but rather is chasing useful and 'safe' things.
- tootie 8y agoThey chase profits. These businesses tend to be very siloed and if they lose money on a new business venture, it's their money that's lost and not depositors. They are probably absorbing a tiny fraction of the risk they absorbed by making shaky but traditional investments in the early 2000s.
- otabdeveloper1 8y ago> paymentsd Is this a hipster daemon written in Go? :)
- ntxy 8y agothis is actually systemd-paymentsd [0] man systemd-paymentsd
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mark_l_watson 8y agoWow, this is big. I disagree with some of the negative comments here, but that is what I love about HN: diverse opinions. Being able to not transact large amounts of money and instead using a permissioned blockchain to prove you have the funds seems like a great use case to me. Although mining some ether was fun as was making money on bitcoin, I believe that the really interesting applications will probably be in permissioned systems that either like JP Coin allow virtual transactions or support smart contracts. To get started, taking the eDX course on blockchain for business is a good start. I also admit that after working as an AI/machine learning practitioner since the 1980s that blockchain applications interest me just because it is something new (for me).
- annonch 8y agoI agree that smart contracts are by far the most interesting thing about this kind of blockchain idea. However since it is permissioned (i.e., not a blockchain), then JP can just change the rules whenever they want. The novel idea that came out of blockchain was the permissionless aspect. While there are tons of problems with blockchain today, you have some assurance that the smart contract will operate as the terms originally sent to the chain. Having a JP run a blockchain essentially cant provide any more (meaningful) assurance than an existing written contract by JP. Furthermore to say that interesting applications will emerge in permissioned blockchains is akin to saying ever since 2010 Neural networks will make a large impact. It may be true but NNs have been around for decades while Permissioned Blockchains (i.e., distributed ledgers) have also been around for decades. They are merely; append only, distributed, permissioned data structures/bases that have some level of throughput and information guarantees
- johnmarcus 8y agoBlock chains are always permissioned in a way though. The developers create the rules, and if you have commit access, you can change them. It’s more open, but it’s still permissioned.