Comment by excerionsforte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by excerionsforte | Hacker News Reader

Blockchain is a valid solution for fast settlement clearing between market participants. JPM and Visa have already proven it their private blockchains. NASDAQ among others are experimenting with their own private blockchains.

JPM use of their own Onyx blockchain makes the repo market far more efficient: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/jpmorgan-...

Visa B2B Connect for global payments: https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vba

I get it, blockchain makes for a flashy clickbait headline. There are bigger problems in the project than the selection of blockchain as a solution.

- Project was 63% with an uncertain timeline to completion. That alone is a red flag for any enterprise project.

- The teams involved weren't communicating with each other resulting in confusion. aka "misaligned views".

- When it comes to scalability, there is no way to rate limit participants, so they could screw the system given it couldn't process more than 100k transactions (not sure what rate since it is unspecified).

There are multitude of issues that justify canning the project.

For those unaware ASX used VMWare's DLT blockchain: https://www.vmware.com/welcome/asx.html. There's nothing "scammy" about it.

I'm unsure of why people in the comments here are still confused between cryptocurrency and blockchain especially since they have distinct names. If you're gonna point out incompetence, you have to realize your own faults as well.

Anyone who claims to have enough information to make a determination about blockchain tech being the cripple here doesn't have the information required to make it given the problems pointed out. There's plenty of financial industry users making use of it already.

Lots of tunnel vision below, but that's unsurprising given the hate against crypto (which people below often confuse with blockchain). I remember the same bias against K/V dbs (NoSQL). People would blame the tech choice rather than the circumstances. It's easier for certain types to blame tech for everything then hail it when the project succeeds even though it was only one part of the equation.

A blockchain is an immutable distributed ledger with extreme zero-trust computational overheads to appending entries, whose entire history is stored on ever instance.

If you see this from an CSci (data structures & algs) pov, you can quickly see it's a extremely niche academic solution to a problem almost no one outside academia could plausibly be interested in.

A blockchain is not a "valid solution for fast..." anything. It's practically useless machine-trust guarantees impose impractical overheads for almost every basic operation.

Any one claiming blockchain is a plausible solution to almost any technical problem is profoundly mislead.

> Blockchain is a valid solution for fast settlement clearing especially between market participants. JPM and Visa have already proven it their private blockchains.

Now, have they? I was surprised to hear this because I was under the impression that blockchain is generally useless in an environment where the participants can trust each other. I searched for "visa jp morgan blockchain" and found these:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilymason/2022/10/11/jp-morgan...

https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/41102/jpmorgan-and-visa...

It seems that JP Morgan is offering a service called "Confirm" to validate account numbers, which Visa is using. This service is apparently offered on a blockchain. But nowhere does it say that these companies would be using a blockchain to actually settle real transactions. And it indeed seems a service to validate account numbers could just as well be offered with a more traditional API, like HTTP/JSON, instead of blockchain.

All the big banks have projects like these. As soon as the hype fades and the CIOs can stop telling their board "yes we're investing in blockchain", the projects will be cancelled.

But the problem still remains that there are almost always ways of doing anything that these ‘private blockchains’ do without a blockchain, that often work better…

This was one of those times.

Yep, the question is really why do they need blockchain in the first place? But I do agree that there was no better way to burn that $250M.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...

Do that 250 * AUD/GBP rate times.

edit: shit forgot to adjust for 28 years of inflation

> Project was 63% with an uncertain timeline to completion. That alone is a red flag for any enterprise project.

This is in my opinion rather a good sign instead of a red flag:

If one is honest, nearly every enterprise software project is something like this. It is rather that nearly all managers are not honest, but pretend that everything is under control and tell you of some fictional timeline for completion.

The fact that they openly admit the state and the uncertainty to completion is to me thus rather a good sign that the stakeholder are much more honest than is common in such projects.

You're mixing up cause and effect. When you make terrible architectural choices, it leads to the other problems you mention. You can't build a house on quicksand, no matter how well your views are aligned, or how certain you think your timelines are.

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