| The "Dole" case you're talking about was not actually how you describe it. This will shock no-one who is used to "blockchain" fans trying to bamboozle them. [Edited to add: The court case that makes this happen isn't related to the share records, it's just the routine shadiness of business owners trying to pay less than something is worth, the discrepancy is noted after the court case is done when trying to reconcile the people who have proof they owned shares, and thus are entitled to a settlement versus how many shares existed] The record keeping worked exactly as intended but it isn't how people tend to imagine, and this is the difference you've tried to portray as somehow being solved by a blockchain when in fact it would not be. Specifically, those millions of "extra" shares are because of short selling. Some of the people who had good reason to believe they'd owned Dole shares, had in fact bought from short sellers who'd sold shares they didn't yet have. If Dole had not gone private, the short seller buys those shares (maybe for a lot more but they hope for a lot less) and passes them on. But it did go private, so the short seller is responsible for paying up what the private buyer agreed to pay for these shares. This part all worked, all those shareholders got their money. But the court case changes how much money they were entitled to, years later - and since the court isn't in the business of doing complicated financial paperwork it just told the businesses which implement all this it's their problem and wished them luck. Most of these owners will be huge institutions and will have an existing relationship with an equally huge broker and that relationship will have likely determined what happened next (e.g. this loss from hard-to-trace shorts isn't worth it, just give them their money in full and write it off). The blockchain could have exactly reproduced this outcome, but it would not have improved upon it at all. |