> Essentially, EY expects public blockchains to do for B2B what ERP software did for internal operations. They're building zero-knowledge tech to make that sufficiently private and help with scaling.

Yes, but it's totally and completely unnecessary. If a company doing business with another company doesn't trust either the other company or a mutual jurisdiction to remediate -- they just shouldn't be in business together. No amount of blockchain magic fairy dust is going to change that.

Blockchain also only accurately reflects things solely encapsulated within the blockchain. As soon as you're trusting someone to enter data they can enter false data, and now you've got a permanent immutable ledger of hot garbage.

It may not be "necessary" but the keynote is about the reasons it's vastly more efficient than what we're doing today. They've done real-world case studies to prove it.

It's not more efficient than an RDS instance.

The video you linked leads with "it's been too complicated in the past to explain return on investment" lol, if you can't tell me if your product will save me money or not, your product is bad and will cost me money.

It's like going to buy a new fangled electric car, and you asking the salesman, hey, so how much will this save me on gas! And the salesman responds: "well that's hard to say." That's not a good sign.

Key words there are "in the past." An RDS instance is not the sort of thing they're talking about at all. In one case study, they took a licensing process at Microsoft and reduced it from several weeks long to one minute, and reduced overall cost by 99%.

You could run everything on one system, but companies don't like trusting and paying whoever runs that one system, so mostly they run their own systems, send messages back and forth, and do a lot of cumbersome mutual auditing. That's exactly the sort of thing EY works on for a living.

I watched the whole awful video.

There's absolutely no reason that (1) Microsoft licensing should have taken a month to begin with, that's madness, you can buy a license on their website in seconds -- so it was a process and policy issue, not a technology issue and (2) there's no reason that if you trust Microsoft and Windows to validate that license information that you can't trust them to store that license information alongside your receipt/proof of purchase. None. They're required to hold on to it by law anyways. And if they don't honor it (and they will) you can always sue them.

Who on earth needs to validate MyCo has a license to Windows other than MyCo and Microsoft? Absolutely nobody. And if you don't trust Microsoft to honor the license in the first place why are you doing business with Microsoft?

Now beyond that, EY. They're not selling blockchain, they're selling SaaS apps built on top of blockchain technology because they need to meet CTO/CIO buzzword quotas. Their SaaS apps could be just as easily run on, wait for it, AWS.

I'm pretty sure you could rewind the tape a couple of decades and find the same presentation about XML.

Don't worry, the video actually mentions explicit support for XML in their Blockchain tools, too, around minute 46. Faxes too!

It could be, (and not saying it will be), but it could be over time the last good money standing. Or last good money that is easy to transfer standing.

The transnational nature of it is interesting. But otherwise ya, I agree. Very niche at the moment and not really exploding in use or use case.