[the_mitsuhiko]

> No, actually, the one thing the blockchain provides, which was literally unsolved before pre-Nakamoto, was a working implementation of "trustless" consensus.

That's the part banks do not care about so I think it's largely irrelevant in the context of this article.

[coderzach]

> That's the part banks do not care about so I think it's largely irrelevant in the context of this article.

I have no idea where you got that idea, but it's not true. Which is why any deal that happens between institutions (and sometimes intra-institution) has an army of middle men who are responsible for verifying, monitoring, reporting, etc etc.

[brians]

But you still need them in a Blockchain world, and still need to trust them.

[wmf]

Or you could convince some other banks to vouch for your transactions if you vouch for theirs and then get rid of the middlemen.

[yummyfajitas]

No, because many of the middle men are there because you don't trust yourself.

Imagine you wanted to build a Hubspot/Triggermail/Vero type system, where you send emails to users when certain events are triggered.

Now suppose you use Sendgrid or Amazon to actually transmit your mail. You are unlikely to give very many developers actual sendgrid keys or access to call sendgrid. Most developers will call an internal API to send mail. This internal API will then perform a bunch of sanity checks - duplicate detection, rate limits, dirty word filters, etc.

Can you "cut out the middle man" by letting each internal service have their own internet connected SMTP server, and stop paying sendgrid and fire whoever builds the internal API? That would be pretty silly.

Similarly, a bank can't really get rid of the risk checks, money laundering checks, data normalization checks, etc.

[Ar-Curunir]

Isn't this similar to the cryptocurrency Stellar

[kordless]

You can use Stellar to build a gateway to another store of value, including bitcoin, dollar, mpesa, rai stone or, my favorite analogy, barn doors you have sitting in a shed somewhere.

[lhl]

I spoke at length w/ a friend working on mortgage-backed securities for GS a few years ago and dealing with third-party (and even intra-office) trust was specifically why he was looking into blockchains, but I'll admit to not being super familiar w/ R3's blockchain implementation. If anyone has a less diatribey and more technical resource they could link to that'd be great.

[tigershark]

It will never work in that use case. And I was hoping that the recent ethereum fork after the Dao debacle made it clear for everyone..

[to3m]

They will probably not be using the public Ethereum blockchain, so the fork won't be relevant.

[CyberDildonics]

I think Bangladesh cares about it by now

[nemild]

Is your argument that Bangladesh would have been safe if they were using a blockchain? Given their revealed security practices, I'd be surprised if they had the ability to secure any private keys from being revealed - and they would have had even less recourse with a blockchain based system (though admittedly, their recourse is limited even now).

[tigershark]

I don't think so. They would have lost ALL if the private key would have been compromised. In this case they even managed to block some transactions and recover quite a big chunk of money.