[ryporter]

Though it will surely be a (very) long process, I'm excited about the ways in which blockchain technology can improve the efficiency of the financial system. There's an amazing disconnect between the speeds with which we can execute and settle trades. The former is on the time scale of milliseconds, while the latter is on the time scale of days.

Even if we disagree on the merits of HFT, we can surely agree that settlement is an unnecessarily slow and unreliable process. In September, 2011 (the most recent date for which I could easily find data), there was a failure to deliver $200M worth of stock per day! [1] In the Treasury market, the daily average is currently $50B! [2] Blockchain technology has the potential to solve this problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_to_deliver

[2] http://www.dtcc.com/charts/daily-total-us-treasury-trade-fai...

[nivertech]

Failure to deliver is mostly due to naked shorts and can be easily solved by a corresponding regulation. It is completely orthogonal to the Blockchain concept: one can implement settlement rules which require locating shares prior to shorting them, another implementation wouldn't care about locating shares as long as there is an obligation to cover naked short at the end of the trading day.

Patrick Byrne from t0 will agree with you, but that's b/c he's against naked shorts.

[1] https://t0.com/

[rottyguy]

Patrick is well known to be the CEO of Overstock, son of John Byrne (Geico fame), and enemy #1 of the Naked Short sellers. What may be less known is his unbelievable fight against cancer.

I read his speech from a charity event back several years back, periodically, to keep perspective.

http://www.pmc.org/blog/2015/9/17/pmc-threshold-moment-billy... (scroll down)