Blockchains, Teens and Hedge-Fund Hotels | Hacker News Reader

Blockchains, Teens and Hedge-Fund Hotels

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101 pointsedward31 comments

Does anyone trust back office developers at major banks to implement a cohesive, industrywide blockchain-based replacement for 30 or 40 years of settlement and clearance technology?

I sure as hell don't, and I work in the space: we'll get too distracted writing AbstractBlockchainFactoryFactories to do right by the problem.

You don't have to trust them.

That's the great thing about the free market.

Transaction costs are non-trivial and determine in large part the structure of a market.

> AbstractBlockchainFactoryFactories

scary but true

That's not really fair to our AbstractBlockchainProxyDelegate!

Cue the creation of the "Satoshi Pattern"

I believe you are looking for the term 'ponzi scheme'

"trust" is too strong of a word here (do you trust that your bank has their act together 100%?), but I don't see how these developers would be less trustworthy than the bitcoin core dev team or ripple labs etc etc.

If anything, the banks and financial industry in general are reasonably rigid and not very interested in chasing "the next best thing" just for the sake of it.

A very obvious outcome of this approach is the ridiculous amount of time it takes to clear an ACH transaction domestically for example.

I guess my point is when it comes to implementing changes the banks are no less trustworthy then most of the other players in the financial industry.

...the ridiculous amount of time it takes to clear an ACH transaction domestically for example.

My impression is that this has more to do with banks' desire to book transactions at just the right time (e.g. to maximize fees charged or minimize leverage ratio) than with technical limitations.

ACH flow is basically a set of batches executed by the parties involved in a sequential manner, taking about a day each with cutoff times sometimes as early as 2PM EST to boot. This system dates to the 70s.

Mexican SPEI system for example is almost real time (they too have a cut off time I think it's 5 PM EST).

Idk, in my case I'm just building a modern programming language that can model this stuff properly https://github.com/hopper-lang/hopper

No abstract beans or buns or factories involved. Lots of lambdas though.

1) Innovation of bitcoin is proof of work, not a chain of blocks. 2) credit crunch for unicorns is troubling. we should all be worried about where this can lead.

> Innovation of bitcoin is proof of work, not a chain of blocks.

Proof of work was invented in the late 90s by Adam Back. The consensus algorithm using proof of work and a blockchain is what Bitcoin brought to the world.

Adam would say that the difficulty calibration was the innovation satoshi brought, as most everything else existed elsewhere in some capacity

> Proof of work was invented in the late 90s by Adam Back. The consensus algorithm using proof of work and a blockchain is what Bitcoin brought to the world.

Wikipedia disagrees:

> The concept may have been first presented by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in a 1993 journal article.

Adam Back invented hash cash as one form of POW.

True, I was wrong. Thank you for the correction.

I'm interested to hear Digital Asset's explanation of why a blockchain is an appropriate technical tradeoff in an industry with a central clearinghouse.

It's what happens when you have very vocal team members with zeal for shoehorning a particular technology.

They've written a whitepaper explaining their reasoning, listing over a dozen benefits. https://www.finextra.com/finextra-downloads/newsdocs/embraci...

I'm surprised DTC is pushing this. If it catches on, DTC becomes obsolete. DTC is a centralized clearing house not tied to any single bank. That's the traditional way to get a combined ledger between mistrustful parties.

Maybe that's why DTC wants to control the technology. What they're apparently doing first is applying a distributed ledger to some kinds of big, reasonably infrequent trades that are currently a headache.

>centralized clearing house not tied to any single bank. That's the traditional way to get a combined ledger between mistrustful parties.

somehow reminded about opening pages of Cryptonomicon describing an alternative to centralized clearing house. I think that the new block-chain tech being developed by the banks would look and feel surprisingly pretty much the same as the one described by NS :)

> DLT may be able to provide regulators with visibility into the trading portfolios of swaps counterparties that they lacked during the financial crisis and that Dodd-Frank mandated.

Err, except, as you said, Dodd-Frank mandated that visibility, and banks have been reporting their swap portfolios for around 3 years.

These non-work blockchains are really scammy. Anyone around here have a journaled database that's not selling? Call it a blockchain, and wall street will open its wallets.

I can't speak for anything else out there, but Tendermint is about providing real accountable BFT middleware.

https://github.com/tendermint/tendermint/wiki/Byzantine-Cons...

Calling this a journaled database is an understatement.

Hello jaekwon :)

So this blockchain is called hyperledger [1].

According to coindesk; "Digital Asset said Hyperledger includes a "prototype implementation" of the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus module, which would serve as an alternative to the mining process." [2]

[1] https://www.hyperledger.org/ [2] http://www.coindesk.com/digital-asset-new-details-hyperledge...

It seems that they don't really need blockchains (meaning fault tolerant consensus algorithms). I'm doubtful that these networks would be truly open, that they would allow untrusted partners on it. Auditing and logging should be enough.

What they really need is peer to peer protocol standards for clearing. "Blockchain" seems to be enabling a discussion on this.

Algorithms/protocols to solve the consensus problem in the presence of arbitrary "Byzantine" faults have been around for a long time (since the 1980s, at least e.g. [1]), and they keep getting better. Make the network closed-access (i.e. where the owners of all nodes are known/approved), and voila, you've also got resistance to Sybil attacks.

The end result is something with blockchain characteristics, but at lower computational cost than Proof-of-Work. Maybe that's not something everyone wants, but banks do.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...

I know banks don't want that, because if they did, they'd have been using it 10 or 20 years ago when it was invented.

The article explains why this is not true: back-end financial technology is boring and banks weren't willing to spend enough money or risk on upgrading them until overwhelming blockchain blockchain blockchain hype pushed them over the edge.

What's different now:

* Better BFT algorithms (e.g. lower network load, more reliable in practice)

* Faster computers

* Better computer networks

* Cheaper storage

* Better software development and deployment practices (faster, more reliable, more secure)

* and yes, the recent interest in BFT spurred by Bitcoin.

For example, the original algorithms had network load that was exponential in the number of nodes, O(2^N). Some newer non-POW algorithms are O(N*polylog(N)).

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