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A comment on Big Banks Are All Over Blockchain. Parent comment

Re:Big Banks Are All Over Blockchain by DennisP on Wednesday December 27, 2017 @04:07PM (#16018039)
You wouldn't. You use a blockchain when you want one common ledger across multiple companies, and you don't want to pay/trust a single company to manage it.

Assuming you know who everyone is, you can use traditional consensus mechanisms like Byzantine Paxos and get much higher transaction rates than public blockchains can do right now.

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Re:Big Banks Are All Over Blockchain by ucaetano on Wednesday December 27, 2017 @04:15PM (#16018100)
You use a blockchain when you want one common ledger across multiple companies, and you don't want to pay/trust a single company to manage it.

Not really, you can have a blockchain managed by a single company. In the most basic definition, a blockchain is simple an authenticated linked sequence of records. It can be public or not, it can be processed centrally, distributed across a single organization, or distributed in a peer-to-peer fashion.

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Re:Big Banks Are All Over Blockchain by DennisP on Wednesday December 27, 2017 @07:10PM (#16019257)
I guess so but usually people mean something that includes a distributed consensus algorithm.
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Re:Big Banks Are All Over Blockchain by canoebuilder on Wednesday December 27, 2017 @04:14PM (#16018095)
With bitcoin, because the participants aren't identified and there isn't any form of traditional trust established between them, there are certain actors in the system that are paid a lot to manage the transactions/blockchain.

In your example of multiple companies coordinating on a single blockchain, who would be paid to manage it?

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Re:Big Banks Are All Over Blockchain by DennisP on Wednesday December 27, 2017 @06:15PM (#16018936)
It's way cheaper than on Bitcoin because there's no PoW. Each participant would pay to run their own servers that connect to it.
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Re:Big Banks Are All Over Blockchain by viraptor on Wednesday December 27, 2017 @04:39PM (#16018259)
Why would you want a consensus? In what financial situation would you expect the bank to say: this entity says the account has X, but those two entities say it has Y, so I'll accept Y?
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Re:Big Banks Are All Over Blockchain by DennisP on Wednesday December 27, 2017 @06:20PM (#16018973)
That's not how blockchain consensus works. Once block number X is finalized, everyone sees the same data in block number X.

If a block isn't finalized, and you build a transaction based on particular conditions in that block, and the finalized block has different conditions, then your transaction just fails.

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Re:Big Banks Are All Over Blockchain by viraptor on Thursday December 28, 2017 @01:36AM (#16020704)
> everyone sees the same data in block number X

The same data in a specific block, but not everyone necessarily agrees that the same block is the latest one. That's why you don't have 100% confidence in a single block confirmation.

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Re:Big Banks Are All Over Blockchain by DennisP on Thursday December 28, 2017 @07:54AM (#16021743)
Exactly, what I mean by "finalized" is that everyone agrees and there's a very low probability that they'll change their minds.
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Re:Big Banks Are All Over Blockchain by viraptor on Thursday December 28, 2017 @01:28PM (#16023812)
And until it's not confirmed enough times, the number on your account can effectively change if enough parties agree. You seem to agree with what I wrote so far...
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