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Comment by exdsq | Hacker News Reader

I believe central bank digital currencies are mostly built on managed block chains because the data structure works well. The Hamilton Project between the Boston bank and MIT Digital Currencies group are looking at two implementations for a digital dollar and one of those is a ‘classical’ centralized blockchain

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Explain to me why banks would need blockchains over federated databases. All these federated databases have strict audit trails and controls.

Banks have been using these for nearly 50 years and the systems are very well understood. Event Sourcing as a concept and WORM drives as an implementation are mathematically proven to work already and don't need the complexity and overhead of a blockchain in a regulated, audited environment.

Look forward to what I'm missing.

I've been asking this question for the last 5 years every time someone pitches "blockchain for X". I have yet to see a satisfactory answer other than handwavy appeals like "but it's immutable".

This inability of advocates to clearly and concisely explain the pros and cons of their own technology is what constantly sets off my bullshit detector when people talk about blockchain.

> This inability of advocates to clearly and concisely explain the pros and cons of their own technology is what constantly sets off my bullshit detector when people talk about blockchain.

I don't think you will be disappointed in your approach. I have mentioned some real problems that I think needs to be addressed in this very unpopular comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349821

Programmable money is the most obvious one. We don’t know each other but say we wanted to bet on a 1v1 video game match. We bet $100 on the outcome of a CoD game. I can write a smart contract that acts as an escrow account that accepts two payees, requires the amount to be $100, and queries the CoD API to check the result of a match ID paying out to the correct payee or pays back in 24 hours if it never happens. This is all within the payment system itself and can be represented in maybe 50 lines of code. Because it’s a blockchain you can see the code for yourself and you know it’s immutable so I can’t rug pull.

My favorite part is when I come along, exploit a bug in the smart contract, and neither of you gets the money, because Code Is Law on the immutable blockchain.

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