> some are calling it "Distributed Ledger"

Friend runs settlement infrastructure for a large bank. It's not sexy work. He has to fight for his budget. His TL; DR with a lot of this is it has made getting necessary infrastructure upgrade approvals easier.

Been needing to unify wire confirmations with some esoteric trade settlement system? Talk about Ripple. Adding real-time functionality to a net settlement system? It's a "distributed ledger". Boss gets a press release and maybe a glowing write-up, IT gets its kit.

This. McKinsey/BCG/others makes presentations to banks executive boards saying Distributed Ledgers are the future and you need to get onboard if you want to survive. Now every IT department head will try to do nonsense distributer ledger stuff for his promotion/bonus and business department heads will be OK because they don't want to be blamed for missed opportunities.

> because they don't want to be blamed for missed opportunities

It sounds more rational than that. Blockchain announcements make headlines. And blockchain headlines are driving stock prices [1]. There are numpties in the mix, but I don't think it's them.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/crypto-cr...

I completely understand. And this is a problem with other hyped up technology too.

One of my previous companies, we had people working on 'far reaching ML and AI stuff'. What they were actually doing was calculating euclidean distance between users to build a recommendation engine. Data size was around 100-150 items but every user had access to max 20 items. Questions about - Do we really need a complete recommendation system to select from 20 items? Fell on deaf years.

Great press for the manager and IT gets to show off something new.

The problem with this kind of cryptocurrency hype is that Average Joe is putting money into bitcoin because "I read DBS is using blockchain so bitcoin will go up".

Another phrase, perhaps along the lines of "probability of bet" would be a much better term than "proof of work" given that the reason the energetic commitment of work matters at all is that it represents a finite unit of value that someone, somewhere, allocated to a given blockchain in the form of risk. The amount of underlying value at risk is actually unknown because nobody knows what the cost basis was of the electricity used to "purchase" it. But using proof of work to describe the mechanism of committing a bet to a blockchain is rather like calling the ante in a card game "proof of chip toss". It's technically correct but it describes a relatively incidental aspect of the incentive construction process.

Tim Swanson: Enterprise Blockchain is in a "Trough of Disillusionment”

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/tim-swanson-enterprise-...

Would a GIT repo work better than a blockchain for a large bank?

For what exactly? Banks used append only transaction tables with hashes to prevent row tampering/reorder ages ago.