[wmf]

The catch is at the end: "There are some downsides to losing decentralized consensus. A ledger-backed service could manipulate the order in which it handles requests, or reject some requests altogether, and clients would have a hard time proving it." Calling that a "secure ledger" is kind of a stretch.

[pfraze]

There's aaalways a catch.

See my response to hagreet. Neither of those problems are unfixable.

[kybernetikos]

Incidentally, I think there may be a product here that could be sold to financial institutions. Check out

https://www.hyperledger.org/ https://www.r3.com/

There are lots of other 'private blockchain' distributed ledgers being pitched right now to financial institutions and to me the distributed aspect of them seems like a bit of an inconvenient and unnecessary complication for those use cases.