Looking at JPMorgan's Liink, there is no proof that this is anything more than a cynical publicity stunt to try to capture some of the money sloshing around in the crypto hype. Most of its touted features are things that could have been done without blockchain and should have been done decades ago if they were willing to invest in modernizing things.
It's not being sold to end-user rubes. It's a way to try and suck banks into JPMorgan's technology ecosystem (promising to settle repurchase agreements faster and save lots of interest intraday).
It's not huge yet-- only about $1 billion per day flows through it.
At this point you're trusting JP Morgan and link to run the ledger. What if I disagree with a transaction and fork the ledger? How is this any different to JP Morgan running a SQL database and speaking a common protocol?
Liink is ETH derived, so it's hybrid proof-of-stake and proof-of-work.
(Of course, JP Morgan likely dominates both at this point, but they don't have to).
So what happens if someone comes along and stakes $X Billion and becomes the majority stakeholder? Do you _really_ think that JP Morgan will just sit and let that happen? That they won't fork? That Deutsche Bank will continue to stand by the ledger if a group of anonymous traders from China become the majority stake?
It's a technical solution to a political problem.
> Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.) In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they’re distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They’re blockchains in name only, and—as far as I can tell—the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an...
Liink appears to have all three elements Schneier describes-- an immutable ledger distributed over many participants that any of the participants can read; the ETH consensus algorithm; and the third is a US-dollar backed stablecoin.
> In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features.
Yes, there's a limited number of participants with varying degrees of mutual trust. So this criticism is accurate, but I don't find the actual mechanism you get worthless.
In any case, note that what I said was not that blockchain was here to stay, but distributed ledgers. So even if one got rid of the specific consensus algorithm and the value token, you'd still have a distributed ledger.
In particular it's not about having many trusted participants, it's about being public without any trust (from the blog post: "This ledger is public, meaning that anyone can read it").
Distributed ledgers are being used for real business cases in banking. Realizing these full benefits will take a very slow process of societal adoption and legal/evidentiary recognition.
I said "not going away". These use cases are going to slowly grow and become ubiquitous, but it will be a very slow process. It isn't some overnight disruption where notaries vanish and banking is dis-intermediated in the next 5 years.
> where are the companies benefiting from this competitive advantage
E.g. JP Morgan and Liink are quietly connecting hundreds of banks and using it to more robustly and quickly move payment-related information between banks.