[kybernetikos]

It's fun to see this here after I've just spent some of the afternoon 'pitching' 'Centralised Ledger Technology'. Single source of truth, verifiable, secure, permissioned, efficient, scalable, the advertising copy writes itself (or would if you needed it to, rather than just taking any of the copy from hyperledger or simlar and fixing it up a bit). Any of the people selling private block chain solutions will generally tell you that there needs to be a strong political actor within a 'business network' that can insist on the use of the distributed ledger. The truth of course is that Mr Car Loader or Mr Fruit Picker who is lent on to run a node on the distributed ledger really couldn't care less about whether they are verifying other peoples transactions or not, they'd be just as happy with a web site that they fill the details in, or a signed email system. Indeed, they might ask - why should I be expected to run computation to secure bits of the value chain I never see, I just care about confirming what I've received and what I've passed on, and I can do that by digitally signing a transfer note.

I don't particularly think that using a central secure ledger is surprising or new, but I do think that politically the furor around DLT (and who knows, maybe one day CLT too) has provided us with a fantastic political opportunity to actually fix some of the horrendousness in financial software systems.

To my mind, even if the relevant technological change is pretty minor or nonexistent, this is an opportunity for us to replace a bunch of miserable systems duct taped together with more modern systems that have externally accessible APIs baked in from the start.