[riskable]

Well, for a bank it can be super duper useful because it's "incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions" (the very definition of a blockchain). So if you're transferring money from one bank to another it makes it all but impossible to mess with that transaction in flight (man in the middle attacks, timing attacks, replay attacks, etc).

Another example would be trades: Most people think of trades as buying stocks and bonds in an open market but there's a lot of private/internal-to-an-organization markets too. The blockchain is an excellent way to facilitate such transactions.

Being in banking (where we're trying to take advantage of blockchain transactions) the objections from management so far have been surrounding the inability to "undo" a transaction. Even though you can just make the same transaction in reverse afterwards the price of whatever it was that you're trading could've changed resulting in some troublesome circumstances.

For it to work you have to negotiate contracts ahead of time to ensure that all parties participating understand the ramifications of such a system. Since the blockchain is new technology it will be difficult to get 3rd parties to sign of on such things.

[nawitus]

'because it's "incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions" (the very definition of a blockchain)'

I would think that blockchain requires it to be a distributed ledger. A non-distributed digital ledger is simply a Merkle tree?

" So if you're transferring money from one bank to another it makes it all but impossible to mess with that transaction in flight (man in the middle attacks, timing attacks, replay attacks, etc)."

You can use non-blockchain cryptography to guarantee that.

[riskable]

> You can use non-blockchain cryptography to guarantee that.

Not in the same way though. An attacker could still modify the transaction after-the-fact at both endpoints during or after reconciliation processes (sadly, most banking transactions still happen in batch and there's multiple reconciliation processes every day). They could hack the reconciliation process(es) to undo or modify transactions later in the same day or--depending on the banks in question--days later.

Then there's also the possibility of just changing balances at one end of the transaction (flat out) with no way for the 3rd party to perform the equivalent of double-entry accounting to verify that the amount received matches what was sent. Bank transfer reconciliation catches problems like this all the time and it's baffling to me (but apparently has legitimate causes).

A blockchain would completely negate any such attacks and make reconciliation pointless.

[runeks]

> Well, for a bank it can be super duper useful because it's "incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions" (the very definition of a blockchain).

If that’s the definition of a blockchain then it must include proof-of-work. Data doesn’t become incorruptible because you put it inside a block that points to the hash of a previous block.