[davidgerard]

PREDICTION: all examples in this thread will be hypothetical. If a real-world example is linked, it will be a pilot programme, probably one IBM is writing press releases about.

I have a book coming out next week (!) on the subject. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ I have a whole chapter on business blockchains, and I looked hard for a real-world example of one in use. There actually aren't any.

The closest we have is .. git! Transaction ledgers, each with a tamper-evident hash, in trees and chains of hashes. Devs routinely throw entire ledgers/repos around, identified by hash. It definitely counts as a "distributed ledger technology", and it's hugely successful. The only thing it doesn't have is a consensus mechanism - it's "here is my tree" or "here is this repo, this is the hash".

As we're seeing here today, most claims for business blockchain are literally the airiest hypotheticals regarding Bitcoin, with the buzzword changed.

The usual concrete posited use cases are interoperability (that it will magically clean up your data and formats) and that it will magically resolve real-world human-level disputation. Neither of these is likely to work out that way.

[haspok]

Not entirely hypothetical example (although still "beta"): http://www.coindesk.com/asx-completes-first-distributed-ledg...

"The decision of whether to use the technology as an commercial-grade replacement [of ASX's existing settlement system] will be made in fiscal year 2018."

[davidgerard]

yeah, I actually cover that one in passing. Digital Asset Holdings (Blythe Masters/Hyperledger) sold the previous CEO a pile of blockchain bafflegab that wasn't realisable with any extant blockchain (and certainly not Hyperledger). Said previous CEO had to resign after a bribery allegation, and the new guy isn't very keen on the plan. The main thing driving it is that their old system is creaky as hell.

The thing is, though, that blockchains promise replacement by magic, and there's no magic there - it's just as much work as any major system replacement. Also, other stakeholders are already unhappy this doesn't interface a lot like the old system did.

If this pilot works out at all, I suspect the first thing they'll do is rip out the blockchain and replace it with a conventional centralised database. Because this is for dealing with the ASX, and centralisation is obviously the correct thing and "permissioned blockchain" is another word for "the world's most inefficient centrally-administered clustered database".