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I'm very bullish on federated, permissioned, blockchains in the world of traditional finance, and here's why: - Having ledger that is append only by a set of t
by rattlesnakedave 5y ago
I'm very bullish on federated, permissioned, blockchains in the world of traditional finance, and here's why:
- Having ledger that is append only by a set of trusted parties gives you all of the benefits of a distributed ledger, as well as the ability to do things like clawbacks, comply with regulation, etc.
- The future I see is multiple blockchains operated by networks of payment processors. For instance, Visa, MasterCard, etc. can all work together to maintain one blockchain. Other countries / regions can have their own. Interop can be done with bridges (like in defi now).
- Throughput can be drastically increased between banks. Transactions become confirmed instantly. No more waiting several days for ACH. You can confirm a good balance from the sender, and credit the receiver instantly.
- "Just use a database" the hackernews commenter shouted out. Using a database instead of a blockchain limits what you can do in terms of 3rd party interop, and hamstrings you for upgradability in the future. Facebook's MySQL upgrade is taking YEARS, and they're a SINGLE TECH COMPANY. If you want to move faster, and maintain interop blockchain is the way to go.
- This opens the door to multi-asset blockchains between financial institutions. Instruments like loans, equities, etc. can be tokenized, FRACTIONALIZED and traded b/t institutions much more quickly than they can today, because they'll be a part of a permissioned verifiable system. Write a loan today, fractionalize and sell it instantly.
There's so much more that's possible here too. Technologies like HyperLedger are really moving the ball forward. I think a lot of the criticisms of this sort of thing are due to shortsightedness of what is possible.
- carlineng 5y agoI'm somewhat bullish on the promise of permissioned blockchain systems, but the Facebook/MySQL example is misleading -- * Facebook doesn't need MySQL to interop with other systems in the same way that blockchain enables. * Relational semantics are way more complex than what most distributed ledgers technologies offer. A blockchain is more analogous to the MySQL binlog than to MySQL itself. I would guess that Facebook's DB transaction log is orders of magnitude larger than all the blockchains in the world combined. * Facebook's challenges with MySQL are most likely due to their unprecedented scale. If one were to layer on the governance challenges associated with distributed ledger systems, I would think an upgrade like that would basically be impossible.
- atom_arranger 5y agoRegarding scale: Bitcoin is a ledger of transactions, it has in the last 12 years had 690m transactions. Facebook has 2.9B MAU. ~4X the number of transactions ever done on BTC. Each user probably generates tens of “transactions” (changes to a DB) per month.
- throwawaygh 5y ago> Write a loan today, fractionalize and sell it instantly. To make error is human. To propagate error to all server in automatic way is #devops. To burn down entire global financial system due to parser bug in bastardized typescript clone for blockchain contract language is #defi. (On a more serious note, this sort of thing really rings of "what could possibly go wrong" for me :)