Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture • Hacker News Board

Re: Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture

#81

Post by runeks » Wed, Jan 18, 2017, 6:31 AM UTC

sho wrote: post #79

runeks wrote: post #28

Can anyone name a single success story about the use of blockchain technology to solve a specific problem, and how this problem was solved using blockchain technology (besides Bitcoin)?

http://www.straitstimes.com/business/banking/ocbc-debuts-use... "OCBC Bank said Monday (Nov 14) it became the first bank in Southeast Asia to use blockchain technology to make local and cross-border inter-bank fund transfers." Textbook use case for blockchain IMO.

I've read the article, and many like it, but I can never find an actual explanation of exactly how a problem was solved using blockchain technology.

It's always marketing speak, with reference to all the wonderful properties of "blockchain technology", and diagrams like [1], which could have simply been summed up in three words: "no payment intermediary". Although... doesn't that diagram look like they just changed the intermediary's name from "Payment Intermediaries" to "BCSIS Blockchain platform", plus added some cool-looking server icons?

But the source code will almost certainly never see the light of day, so we will never really know how they use blockchain technology. At the end of the day, I think it's a lot more likely that this bank's software provider created a new solution and just said it has "blockchain technology" because it's a vague buzzword, and then the bank released a press release based on this, again because of the buzzword effect.

[1] http://www.straitstimes.com/sites/default/files/blockchain.p...

Re: Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture

#82

Post by cm2187 » Wed, Jan 18, 2017, 7:03 AM UTC

6nf wrote: post #78

cm2187 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd add do you need high level of transactions per second. If you need to reverse a hash every time you make a transaction, that's not going to be fast or efficient. Also do you need transaction anonymity. A blockchain is also a public ledger. You may hide behind a secret key but everyone can see what that secret key is doing and has done since the begining. As soon as Morgan Stanley notices that this big trade has t…

Bank clearance only happens once a day, no need for high TPS levels. They do not transfer money bank-to-bank for every transaction, they just add it up and make one settlement transaction at the end of the day.

But then it doesn't add anything over the existing systems. I thought the benefit was precisely immediate and reliable settlements.

Re: Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture

#83

Post by patmcguire » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 3:51 PM UTC

runeks wrote: post #60

patmcguire wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wall Street Clearinghouse to Adopt Bitcoin Technology https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/business/dealbook/wall-st... Hasn't come out yet, but they're clearly a boring company that isn't chasing trends. We'll know in a year or so whether this is all smoke.

> IBM, which has been making a big push into blockchain technology, [...] aims to have it fully functioning by early next year. I believe this is the timeless state of all big Blockchain projects: ready one year from now. I specifically asked for success stories because I know everyone is throwing money after blockchain stuff. So I don't doubt that there are tons of planned projects. However, I haven't yet heard of b…

Yeah, I think you're right. It just doesn't exist yet, everything uses weird weasel language to make the future sound like it's the present.

It is possible there's just too much hype to find the existing use cases, that's one of the weaknesses of Google.