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Comment by SkidanovAlex | Hacker News Reader

The most important aspect of blockchain that is relevant here is that your counterparty half a world away and you both agree that you trust the state of this blockchain, and thus can transact on it.

For business running the same code on their 1 node instead of N is not a replacement, because their counterparty has no reason to trust whatever is running on that 1 node.

Your reasoning re: N nodes are expensive is also flawed. Executing a single payment transaction takes a fraction of a second of compute. Even if it is replicated 10,000X, it's still extremely cheap compute-wise. The low cost of transactions has nothing to do with subsidizing.

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> For business running the same code on their 1 node instead of N is not a replacement, because their counterparty has no reason to trust whatever is running on that 1 node

I mean, why are you doing this kind of business with someone where you can't even trust that?

Aside from that, block chains only provide trust if they're meaningfully decentralized. These hyper specific b2b ones seem unlikely to pass that test. Exactly who all is running verifier nodes?

You don't need verifiers. I interviewed at R3 (now Onyx) in JP Morgan and my take on the business was that it's more of a distributed ledger than a blockchain

Distributed to who?

Businesses do lots of transactions without trusting anyone else's records. Then they do lots of slow, expensive mutual auditing.

This is the main value of a blockchain. You can do business with someone you don't specifically trust without requiring a third party in the middle to mediate the financial transaction.

The only people that need to run a verifier node are those that don't trust the other verifier nodes to do it properly. It's opt in, most will not run one, but a business that has enough money at stake can if they want to.

Then the blockchain client software provides the framework for cryptographic assurance that the two copies of the ledger are in sync.

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