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> Interbank nightly balance settlements between large institutions. A distributed cryptographic ledger would be great for this kind of thing. A private “coin” b
by msbarnett 4y ago
> Interbank nightly balance settlements between large institutions. A distributed cryptographic ledger would be great for this kind of thing. A private “coin” between mostly trusted partners with provisions for reversing transactions as needed.
But they’re already trusted partners who already have a functioning settlement mechanism that already has provisions for reversing transactions. Jamming a blockchain on top of this solves nothing not already solved.
The claim that this would reduce maintenance overhead is hogwash – we’ve seen an unending litany of unexpected bugs in blockchain protocols and smart contracts, while the existing transfer mechanisms are already debugged. Trustless mechanisms are harder to get right than trust-based ones, not easier.
- colechristensen 4y agoHow many serious bugs have there been in bitcoin? All I’m talking about is a simple ledger, not the fancy smart contact nonsense.
- msbarnett 4y ago> All I’m talking about is a simple ledger, not the fancy smart contact nonsense. You wrote: > > A private “coin” between mostly trusted partners with provisions for reversing transactions as needed. Either you’re doing that with a smart contract, or you’re just plain trusting the other people to reverse it when asked, in which case there’s zero reason to be using a blockchain to begin with. You don’t want or need trustless ledgers to interact with trusted parties - that’s a big increase in complexity for zero gain.