That's a common misconception. Solutions to the Byzantine generals problem have been known for a while. Researchers are still looking for more efficient solutio

That's a common misconception. Solutions to the Byzantine generals problem have been known for a while. Researchers are still looking for more efficient solutions, but PBFT introduced in 1999 is already, well, practical. The main problem with anonymous consensus are Sybil attacks. You need a way to limit the size of the consensus pool. Bitcoin does that using proof-of-work (quite elegantly, Bitcoin's PoW does actually a lot more than that, but this is really it's raison d'etre). I recommend reading Ben Laurie on the topic. http://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdf http://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdf --- If you look at the current problem with DTCC, you'll notice is has little to do with centralization, and more to do with the fact that there is no technological transparency. If all of these systems ran with well defined API, most of the issues would go away. What financial are mostly after is a shared ledger with programmatic access. Distributed is just a nice add-on.