IBM and Linux Foundation To Create Blockchain For Major Financial Institutions (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Following initial news of the project in March, IBM, under the supervision of the Linux Foundation and in partnership with several major tech interests including Fujitsu, has announced today that it will lead development of a new blockchain — a financial transaction ledger fashioned after the Bitcoin model. Provisionally called Open Ledger, the new initiative is aimed specifically at financial transactions, and though it will be open source in terms of development, but 'semi-private' in operation. Those with an interest in the project are said to include JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and the Bank of England. IBM VP Jerry Cuomo, who has discussed the project with Fortune and Wired, commented "The current blockchain is a great design pattern...Now, how do we make that real for business? What are the key attributes needed to make that happen? That's what this organization is about."

Comments

Incentive?

[Aaden42]

Isn't the incentive for burning CPU for blockchain verification that you get to claim the transaction fees in BTC? And isn't a large element of its strength the fact that you need relatively crazy amounts of hardware plus consensus from multiple sources to build it, thus making forgery intractable?

How do you incentivize enough CPU power & players into a "semi-private in operation" system? Why do established big players want to mess around with this when they're already getting pretty serious transactions fees doing it the old fashioned, closed everything way?

Other uses of block chain

[Anonymous Coward]

Could there be purposes other than financial for blockchains? It seems it's a great signing/verification method.