3 ms·

>Guys, this works. It's literally how the world works. How about corporate stock? You know how many third parties are involved with the markets and the added

>Guys, this works. It's literally how the world works. How about corporate stock? You know how many third parties are involved with the markets and the added costs of those third parties? Even with a corporation with a stock ledger, stock trusts who own them, banks/brokers who handle all the buying/selling of stock...things don’t work. Take the Dole case where the corporation had almost double the number of stock issued as actually existed. Whereas every corporation could memorialize their stock on the Blockchain and each sale of stock would be completed via smart contract. Instant settlement, no stock trusts, no banks, no brokers...a peer to peer market. Stocks are a particular use case because unlike the authors examples of “real world counter parts” (supply chain, authorship, land registry) shares in a company can be represented entirely digitally allowing the peer to peer and trustless system (at least for purposes of transaction settlement).

snowwrestler 8y ago
The problem with Dole was that there was not one single central ledger of stock transactions that was being kept updated in real time. Would blockchain have solved that? It's centralized in that there is one ledger. But natively resolving and publishing transactions at high speed is not a feature of blockchains yet. A centrally managed ledger without distributed calculations would be way faster. Also worth noting that Dole was a weird enough case to be news-worthy, and that it was ultimately resolved. I think it takes more than a few edge cases to justify completely rebuilding the entire basis for a major part of the global financial ecosystem.
- will_brown 8y ago
  >A centrally managed ledger without distributed calculations would be way faster. Right which will never occur in the current system because each middleman needs to justify their place to keep their piece of the pie. Like I said it’s a system with tons of middlemen (who don’t add value) who could be ripped out and replaced with Blockchain. Dole was “ultimately resolved” only after complex class action litigation that costs millions of dollars and resulted in the party who took dole private having to pay an extra ~$2.50 x ~36.8M shares. It’s clear from any public company that goes private this is a serious issue...Dole is not an edge case.
  - snowwrestler 8y ago
    If we can imagine "ripping out" the middlemen and replacing them with blockchain, then we can also imagine ripping out the middlemen and replacing them with any other centralized ledger.
    - will_brown 8y ago
      Umm...can we? If you rip out the existing middlemen where does the “centralized ledger” come from but another middle man.

snowwrestler 8y ago

The problem with Dole was that there was not one single central ledger of stock transactions that was being kept updated in real time. Would blockchain have solved that? It's centralized in that there is one ledger. But natively resolving and publishing transactions at high speed is not a feature of blockchains yet. A centrally managed ledger without distributed calculations would be way faster. Also worth noting that Dole was a weird enough case to be news-worthy, and that it was ultimately resolved. I think it takes more than a few edge cases to justify completely rebuilding the entire basis for a major part of the global financial ecosystem.

will_brown 8y ago
>A centrally managed ledger without distributed calculations would be way faster. Right which will never occur in the current system because each middleman needs to justify their place to keep their piece of the pie. Like I said it’s a system with tons of middlemen (who don’t add value) who could be ripped out and replaced with Blockchain. Dole was “ultimately resolved” only after complex class action litigation that costs millions of dollars and resulted in the party who took dole private having to pay an extra ~$2.50 x ~36.8M shares. It’s clear from any public company that goes private this is a serious issue...Dole is not an edge case.
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  If we can imagine "ripping out" the middlemen and replacing them with blockchain, then we can also imagine ripping out the middlemen and replacing them with any other centralized ledger.
  - will_brown 8y ago
    Umm...can we? If you rip out the existing middlemen where does the “centralized ledger” come from but another middle man.