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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

But then we're back to square one, aren't you basically describing a distributed (but still perfetly "trustful") database? Isn't that effectively what this DTCC provides?

What in this allows JPMorgan to provide the same service for free? Is it really technical innovation or is it just a different business model? Wouldn't they be able to do the same thing without using anything cryptocurrency/blockchain related?

I feel like I'm missing something obvious but I don't see what it is.

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A blockchain is a distributed non trustful database with a method for resolving disputes built in. Roughly speaking in something like quorum, everyone checks everyone else's work, and the majority consensus is ground truth. DTCC requires a trusted third party to administer the database. Quorum doesn't. Quorum could presumably also replace intra-bank transactions as well (instead of maintaining some other kind of database).

I guess the missing piece that seems to break people's brains; the ledger in the distributed database represents a dollar amount (in the case of quorum's dollar thing) and it has money-like rules, unlike, say, postgres which ultimately relies on some other piece of software to make ledger like transactions.

Unless I am mistaken, DTCC doesn’t provide any trust for internal account balances at JPMC. It only provides trust for the details of transfers. These tokens provide trust before and after transfers. The tokens themselves actually provide no trust during transfers and the transfers are only allowed by trusted parties as a result.

Also, DTCC only handles securities not currency so this doesn’t exist at all.

What actually you should be arguing is that the JP coin and the DTCC need to be combined as they each only provide trust in a certain part of the ecosystem.

Technology can be more than new things; it can also be made of combining old things in new ways, or finding new uses for old things, or even simply new ways of thinking. If we removed "cryptocurrency" and "blockchain" from the above, they'd still have a new settlements process. They're using a distributed ledger to make the process safely automateable and reduce audit costs.

what you're missing, that's obvious, is that blockchain is a solution looking for a problem where none exists. The word was imbued with virtue, and at this point blockchain has come to mean 'virtuous database'

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