Tech and Banking Giants Ditch Bitcoin for Their Own Blockchain

Bitcoin is merely proof of concept for the underlying technology. I expect that there will be many more offshoots in the future, beyond the pieces used by the existing banking system. But I won't really care about any of them, until one of them allows me to work, buy, and sell without being forced to trust any third party that I find to be intrinsically untrustworthy--including governments, banks, cartel enforcers, mobsters, miner brigades, and Anonymous.

Not there yet. This isn't even a step in that direction.

But what I do like about this is that it may have the potential to simplify mutual insurance, interbank settlement, and securities exchanges. It would be nice if the funds from an electronic transfer to my spouse could be made available faster than writing out a paper check and depositing it at a branch ATM. I would also be particularly interested if it could end certain semi-fraudulent practices, such as short positions that are not appropriately matched against a long counterparty, or speculative phantom commodities contracts that are never actually redeemed by delivery.

IBM intends to contribute tens of thousands of lines of its existing codebase and its corresponding intellectual property to this open source community. Digital Asset is contributing the Hyperledger mark, which will be used as the project name, as well as enterprise grade code and developer resources. R3 is contributing a new financial transaction architectural framework designed to specifically meet the requirements of its global bank members and other financial institutions. These technical contributions, among others from a variety of companies, will be reviewed in detail in the weeks ahead by the formation and Technical Steering Committees.

But seriously, "OBC currently offers two implementations of PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant) consensus, as a means to validate transactions".

The article even mentioned at least one existing institution that has an incentive to preserve the problem to which they are the solution:

    "Indeed, some companies involved in the project may feel 
    threatened by existing efforts to reinvent the financial markets 
    with the blockchain. State Street bank, for instance, stands to 
    lose if companies start using Overstock’s technology to borrow 
    stock. In the US, the stock loan business is a $954 billion 
    market; State Street, known as an agent lender, is a big part of 
    that. Its future depends on getting ahead of the game.

http://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/

Bitcoin is great because it works with an unknown set of untrusted entities, and there's no counterparty risk because the ledger is the currency.

Banks have a known set of semi-trusted entities, and want to track off-chain assets. They'll still have counterparty risk, but if they see a way to use chained blocks and something like Byzantine Paxos to speed up interbank settlement, more power to 'em.