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A comment on Blockchain technology could reduce role of banks, says BIS.

Re:Blockchain technology could reduce role of banks, says BIS by Animats on Friday November 27, 2015 @12:05AM (#10635935)
This really has little to do with Bitcoin. A distributed ledger maintained by mutually mistrustful parties is useful for some back-end problems. The Bank for International Settlements, MERS, and Depository Trust Corporation are all candidates for replacement, because they're all just neutral parties that run clearing houses.

What we've learned from Bitcoin is that blockchain technology is robust enough to strongly resist attacks. If it were profitably breakable, it would have been broken by now. That it hasn't been is quite impressive.

As a settlement system, it doesn't require "mining" - just enough mutually mistrustful players that no one can tamper with logged transactions.

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Re:Blockchain technology could reduce role of banks, says BIS by dustingetz on Friday November 27, 2015 @12:20AM (#10635978)
My understanding is that bitcoin has been broken for quite some time as there have been multiple 51% events from mining pools, it's just more profitable (for now) for these parties to keep the status quo
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Re:Blockchain technology could reduce role of banks, says BIS by nmj on Friday November 27, 2015 @12:30AM (#10636004)
Your understanding is incorrect.
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Re:Blockchain technology could reduce role of banks, says BIS by inoop on Friday November 27, 2015 @03:09AM (#10636375)
> What we've learned from Bitcoin is that blockchain technology is robust enough to strongly resist attacks.

Bitcoin is highly vulnerable to spam attacks (as demonstrated several times), malleability, and has forked twice so far, with a double-spend demonstrated during one of them.

Sure Bitcoin's crypto hasn't been broken, but how is that impressive? Bitcoin did not innovate there in any way. It's not like Satoshi invented Merkle trees (otherwise I'm sure they'd be called Satoshi trees:)

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