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Comment by nugget | Hacker News Reader

I don't doubt the underlying blockchain technology will continue to scale but my question has always been the lock-in effect of Bitcoin and other existing crypto-currencies versus new entrants. As the major banks, payment processors, and clearing houses look into moving in this direction it's clear they are going to roll their own solutions.

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Well, I guess that's great. It's a free market, and the best option will win, but a blockchain isn't a blockchain unless you have enough distributed hashing power behind it to ensure that no one entity or small groups of entities has control over the network.

I'm still puzzled as to how banks think they're going to do this.

> to ensure that no one entity or small groups of entities has control over the network.

Why is this necessarily a problem? I think the hard forks in both BTC and ETH have shown that there is an inherent "appeals" process no matter what. Seems like you can separate the appeals process from the underlying settlement and record keeping technology. New blockchain providers just need to represent what the ultimate appeals process is for each implementation (instead of hashing power, could easily be any of a dozen other ideas, including recourse to the existing judicial system which has what I'd call a net-neutral set of advantages and disadvantages).

I don't really understand the question, but anybody can create a fork of Bitcoin anytime they want.

The controversy is over which fork gets to be called Bitcoin.

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