Bitcoin Technology Piques Interest on Wall Street

Re:Bitcoin Technology Piques Interest on Wall Street by Animats on Saturday August 29, 2015 @03:42PM (#10141138)

This has nothing to do with Bitcoin. The interest is in distributed ledgers. It's a way to do a distributed clearing house. When twenty or so mutually mistrustful financial firms maintain a blockchain between them, they can have a ledger that no single party, or less than a majority of the parties, can tamper with.

This doesn't require Bitcoins, a currency, or mining. It's a way to solve a problem that currently requires institutions such as the Bank for International Settlements and Depository Trust Corporation.

Bitcoin has demonstrated that the blockchain technology is resistant to attack. Even against massive fraud attempts, and even though many of the major figures in the Bitcoin world ended up going to jail, the blockchain held up. That's impressive.

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Re:Bitcoin Technology Piques Interest on Wall Street by brighton36 on Saturday August 29, 2015 @05:53PM (#10141454)

Permissioned ledgers haven't actually been deployed anywhere. The entirety of this technology is marketing hype, without much of a definition past "Cure's whatever ails your ledger"

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Re:Bitcoin Technology Piques Interest on Wall Street by wyldfire on Saturday August 29, 2015 @03:44PM (#10141146)

Is twenty enough parties to give them each confidence that the network is trustworthy? Seems to easily manipulated it only takes a couple of dishonest parties to defraud the rest.

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Re:Bitcoin Technology Piques Interest on Wall Street by Animats on Saturday August 29, 2015 @04:10PM (#10141213)

When the ledger is public, yes. Everyone can see tampering. Right now, the top 3 Bitcoin mining pools have 52% majority control of Bitcoin. The top 6 have 80% control. Bitcoin mining hasn't been distributed for a long time now.

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Re:Bitcoin Technology Piques Interest on Wall Street by brighton36 on Saturday August 29, 2015 @05:53PM (#10141449)

"Seeing" tampering is a completely different proposition than preventing tampering. Any good centralized architecture can demonstrate tampering. Google docs does this all the time.

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Re:Bitcoin Technology Piques Interest on Wall Street by Animats on Saturday August 29, 2015 @09:43PM (#10141983)

That requires trusting Google. The goal is to do this without a single trusted party.

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Re:Bitcoin Technology Piques Interest on Wall Street by brighton36 on Sunday August 30, 2015 @03:48PM (#10144290)

If detecting tampering needs to be done without trusting a third party, then md5sum has this figured out back in the early 80's

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