I don't know enough about the financial industry to know if a real actual problem is being solved here. I do assume that any bank in this industry is already required by law to keep a record of all transactions, and that it's all digitally processed and stored. You'd have to hire an auditor to verify the blockchain software too, and even on the ongoing basis, to audit the infrastructure to make sure it hasn't been improperly modified.
This is true, but it's not necessarily organized in a straightforward way, and standards can differ from organization to organization despite everyone attempting to follow GAAP. This is why entire firms exist to audit large corporations.
> You'd have to hire an auditor to verify the blockchain software too, and even on the ongoing basis, to audit the infrastructure to make sure it hasn't been improperly modified.
Not necessarily. Each transaction on the blockchain is cryptographically signed, so all you would need to audit for each transaction is that the claimed signatures verify. It's not possible, even through a bug, to forge a signature if you don't hold the private key.
No. You wouldn't.
And cryptocurrency does not provide immutability anyway. Remember the DAO Ethereum fiasco where they lost a bunch of money and decided to roll it back.
What did happen was a superset of users decided to create a new ledger to run in parallel, containing transactions up until but not including the loss.
The market determined the new ledger to be more valuable
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/08/accidental-bug-may-have-froz...
But we don't want financial transactions to be fully automated and immutable. We want escrow services to be subject to laws, we want a judicial undo and modify button. So if you remove the whole "no one can change history" bit because it's an anti-feature, it is unclear why we need blockchain in the first place.
I'll redily accept that my understanding of blockchain is limited, so I'm open to being told why I'm wrong. Consider this a strong opinion weakly held.