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by generalseven 3492 days ago
If it's going to be a permissioned system anyway, wouldn't you get better performance from a non-blockchain solution?

The permissioned blockchains are being called "a horseless carriage with a horse" by Andreas Antonopoulos.

2 comments

Maybe, our system gets 8k-12k transactions per second with full replication + crypto up to a few thousand consensus nodes (slows down around 4k nodes). That type of performance opens up a lot of potential applications.

As for "a horseless carriage with a horse" perhaps, we'll see. These systems do give you something that you can't get otherwise which is a distributed DB that you can share with competitors without worrying about them stealing from you/breaking it. Blockchain is to overloaded right now, but it's the name that has stuck likely because "a Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant Consensus database" (BFTCDB) is just too impenetrable. If one of these BFTCDB take off, if may not actually be a blockchain (though I suspect it will be because cryptographic data structures are just too useful for them) but I bet it will be called one.

But that the end of the day, that's what a permissioned blockchain is -- a DB you can share, which is a seriously new capability.

True.

I think that there is no way to compete against the speed and relative non-complexity you can get from "closed group, trusted 3rd party" solutions.

There is so much hype and confusion spread around the issue - as there are some genuine threats to some of the bread-and-butter services the banks do, like accounts and payments.

But to put it mildly, the bank executives are for the most time not really in the right career to sort out what's what, and due to the way the banks work, they are not likely to listen to the people that actually know how to do that until a lot of money is wasted and very little has been gained.