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

Bitcoin is already "real for business"

[TechFurryFox]

Bitcoin is already real for business. This blockchain project will fail, people don't want banks in control of money, which is one of the reasons bitcoin was created in the first place.

Re:Bitcoin is already "real for business"

[cfalcon]

> Bitcoin is already real for business.

Bitcoin is real for SOME businesses who operate online. It's not feasible for anyone else, and it is most DEFINITELY not feasible for everyone.

There's just so MANY reasons why bitcoin has issues. I'll list a few, and maybe someone can pop in with more.

1- Bitcoin transactions can take hours to complete, and in no cases do they complete fast. The global transactions per second possible is really low (like less than 20), compared to thousands for credit cards / etc. In *practice* the total transactions per second possible now is less than five.
2- To speed up the transactions to even the theoretical max would require a bunch of random people to agree on standards, but with a low limit they find that people will "bribe" the system by enclosing a transaction fee into their transaction. This moves the transaction higher in the priority (because the processors stand to get some payment). That's not inherently awful, but it means that any time someone wants to speed stuff up for everyone, the people doing the processing stand to lose money- so, of course, they don't want this to happen.
3- Everyone who touches this stuff seems to turn into some kind of thief. It's like dark magic. Feds bust DPR, one of them steals his shit. Mt Gox takes off with everyone's cash, or a hacker does, or who knows, the point is it is gone. It's all gone, every time. Put bitcoins in this jar, I have a plan. Oops, the plan was to take the jar.
4- The people sound absolutely insane. I'm a libertarian, and they sound insane to me- imagine how all this screed sounds to someone who isn't even of that persuasion.
5- A ton of bitcoin are locked up by the person or people who premined it, who may or may not be the businessman who got investigated, or who knows. The whole thing is shrouded in ludicrous amounts of secrecy.

Bitcoin has a niche for now, but this is very volatile and backed by nothing except scarcity. It exists solely because there's no good way to transfer money anonymously without meeting in person- literally any government in the world could tank the price by offering a way to transfer their currency anonymously.

So it's a currency that takes a premium above the market share to buy, takes a premium to trade with, takes minutes at BEST to confirm a transaction, usually involves a transaction hit on the sell, and involves a fee to pay to the miners on any transaction- and everyone involved at the high level is both fully invested and fully delusional. Oh, and the price is ludicrously volatile. And everyone who you trust immediately turns into bats and flies away.

Re:Bitcoin is already "real for business"

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't electronic money, it's a ledger and transaction system. Not the same thing at all. Instead of a "cash" value, you could be trading a stock, a commodity, etc.

Re:Bitcoin is already "real for business"

[ShanghaiBill]

So if it's semi-private, it probably means regular people won't be able to mine, which means that corrupted banks will try to take over

No, that is not what this is about. This is not a takeover of bitcoin by the banks. This is about using a separate semi-private blockchain to verify non-bitcoin transactions. Currently, financial transactions, such as stock or bond sales, can take several days to clear, and involve significant transaction costs. By using a blockchain, these transactions could be verified in seconds, and at lower cost.

Re:Bitcoin is already "real for business"

[shaitand]

"1- Bitcoin transactions can take hours to complete, and in no cases do they complete fast"

Several years ago sure. Typically minutes with todays hashing rate.

"3- Everyone who touches this stuff seems to turn into some kind of thief. It's like dark magic. Feds bust DPR, one of them steals his shit. Mt Gox takes off with everyone's cash, or a hacker does, or who knows, the point is it is gone. It's all gone, every time. Put bitcoins in this jar, I have a plan. Oops, the plan was to take the jar."

In almost every case someone is basically trying to take the form of a bank. In the fiat system all the money is given to the banks (literally, it's created digitally on demand at lower interest than treasury bills, which can then be deposited in the bank allowing the bank to borrow 20x their value, buy tbills with it, deposit, rinse and repeat). You don't need a bank. No deposits, no having your deposits being ripped off. The problem is the transition period. I've got no fix for that one.

"5- A ton of bitcoin are locked up by the person or people who premined it, who may or may not be the businessman who got investigated, or who knows. The whole thing is shrouded in ludicrous amounts of secrecy."

This is the one I hate hearing the most. At it's peak it was like $200 million bucks worth. So what? Look what zuckerberg got for making facebook. He also is still sitting on most of it (okay he's about to give most of it to charity but pick another, bill gates, steve jobs, etc most of them still have the majority of their stock counting on their business growing and the value going up). Why shouldn't the creator of the system and the early adopters (early investors) make more. Bitcoin operates in a circular fashion as a unit of value in proper exchange for goods and services. It is not a ponzi or pyramid. This is a hell of a lot more reasonable than the current fiat system which mathematically depends on generating inflation and then automatically gives all the new inflation to people in the top 0.001%.

"and backed by nothing except scarcity"

Wrong. Scarcity is not bitcoins value. Bitcoins value is that it is currently the only commodity which is impossible to counterfeit. There is not a single .00000000001 BTC worth of fake bitcoin, anywhere, ever. No government can say that about their currency. If they can make it, and do so cheaply enough to make it viable, someone else can produce it as well. Combine that with scarcity and you have not only the perfect value holding unit but something governments can use to exchange with each other. No longer would the US have to trust that China would under value their currency to gain a trade advantage. No longer could new zealand produce almost nothing of value with a tiny population but live like a thriving highly productive western nation. Bitcoin COULD be made inflationary (although once a currency can divide to arbitrary decimal places it mathematically functions the same as an inflationary currency, you just end up trading smaller bits rather than larger quantities and no longer need to figure out who to give the money to). But the system to determine more units were needed in circulation would need to also be a distributed peer system that works automatically based on math. The average transaction size goes below x, add to the blockchain and if 60% of clients agree the extended blockchain is valid the extension is valid.

"takes a premium to trade with"

This is true of all digitial currencies. Even with regular fiat currencies, cash transactions have a premium because they have a minimum unit size and fractions get shaved.

"Oh, and the price is ludicrously volatile."

True but that is primarily a problem of scale. If the bitcoin market were the size of a major nations economy it would be just as stable if not more so.

Re:Bitcoin is already "real for business"

[pla]

1- Bitcoin transactions can take hours to complete
My bank's online billpay can take up to three days to complete. Sending a check out of state can take well over two weeks to arrive and fully clear.

2- [...] people will "bribe" the system by enclosing a transaction fee into their transaction.
I can enter a stock order at a host of retail brokerages for under $10; or, I can pay biiig bucks to have a sub-millisecond line right to the exchange.

3- Everyone who touches this stuff seems to turn into some kind of thief.
First of all, massive selection bias there. And second, welcome to every unregulated item of value ever created. Until some regulatory authority steps in to protect the weak and the stupid, some people just can't seem to throw their money at the criminals fast enough. "Here, stranger, hold this money for me while I look the other way for a few days".

4- The people sound absolutely insane.
I can send money to foreign friends without paying foreign exchange or wire transfer fees. Wow. Lock me in a padded room. I can pay for goods and services online semi-anonymously. Pass the antipsychotics. Again - Selection bias. You've chosen to only hear the crazies over the people just using it in mundane day-to-day transactions.

5- The whole thing is shrouded in ludicrous amounts of secrecy.
And the Federal Reserve won't open its books to outside auditors because?

this is very volatile and backed by nothing except scarcity.
"Scarcity" means it has more backing than every world government issued currency.

It exists solely because there's no good way to transfer money anonymously without meeting in person- literally any government in the world could tank the price by offering a way to transfer their currency anonymously.
And I agree, with the only substantially-true statement you've made. Except, no government will ever offer that as an option (without having a backdoor), making it not much of a threat.

Re:Bitcoin is already "real for business"

[cfalcon]

I'm pretty sure you are serious, so I'll respond.

1- Why are you changing the game to "settlement"? No one cares how long it takes to write a check to clear your credit card balance. Does debit card "settlement" take months? The point is that cash, check, and plastic all take less time than bitcoin to do a goddamned thing with, and all of them have recourse in event of fraud.
"3"- Comparing it to cash is silly. Yes, it can be stolen, like cash. But you don't have to keep all your dollars in cash, whereas you DO have to keep all your bitcoin in bitcoin. Cash is anonymous, instant, can be guarded or hidden trivially, doesn't require electricity to work, doesn't require a functioning internet to work, and doesn't require a huge server farm in China to work- and can be stolen. Bitcoin is sorta anonymous, maybe, and the rest isn't true, except the stealing part.
"4"- I don't need to mount some amazing defense of our money supply in order to point out the numerous problems in bitcoin. Bitcoin seems a very early and problem prone solution to a problem that few people have a lot of, and many people have a little of. Whatever the problems are with fiat currency, they are trivial compared to the strange and destructive environment that is bitcoin.

Also, "Bitcoin is not created for your Grama"... a currency that requires you to be some crypto anarchist cyberpunk guy in order to function at all (before the smarter crypto anarchist cyberpunk guy steals all your shit) is an idea too insane for most novels.

Re:Bitcoin is already "real for business"

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

So if it's semi-private, it probably means regular people won't be able to mine

There is nothing to "mine". They want to record transactions for other entities, entities that are not created by mining in the first place. You're not going to create a share in a corporation by mining. That's also why they need to put in some development work and can't just clone Bitcoin.

Re:Bitcoin is already "real for business"

[JesseMcDonald]

1- Bitcoin transactions can take hours to complete, and in no cases do they complete fast

Several years ago sure. Typically minutes with todays hashing rate.

Hashing rate has zero effect on how quickly transactions are confirmed in the blockchain. The network adjusts the difficulty to counter increases in hash rate such that one block is completed, on average, every ten minutes. This is an important part of maintaining coherency: blocks need to be propagated to (almost) every node across the network in significantly less time than the inter-block interval. If blocks occur too quickly then you get lots of forks and have to wait for more confirmations before you can be sure the transaction is properly recorded, negating any speed gains.

A better counter-argument would be that the GP is comparing apples and oranges. With Bitcoin, once you have a couple of confirmations (on the order of 30 minutes) the transaction is effectively irreversible. To reach that point with any other online payment system requires months. If you don't care about reversibility, Bitcoin transactions are generally visible to the recipient, with 0 confirmations, within a couple of seconds after they're broadcast. At that point the recipient can see that the transaction exists and is (currently) valid, though with a lot of work and some luck it may be possible for the sender to preempt it with another conflicting transaction before it's officially recorded in the blockchain.

Re:Bitcoin is already "real for business"

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what you are saying here is that since it is private there are fewer players, so it is easier for a single player to gain more then 50% of the processing power and doing whatever the fuck they want. This could be solved with technical measures however, precisely because it is a private system. For example each miner may need to be authenticated by all other miners in order to join, there could then be "stay within these limits or you lose access" type requirements. Yes banks are out to screw us over, but they are even MORE out to screw each other over. So you have a bunch of crooks that don't trust each other building the system.

Re:Bitcoin is already "real for business"

[cfalcon]

> You can't easily move large amounts of cash around, though.

The ability to move large amounts of bitcoins around is a cross of feature and bug. The comparison I was responding to was "oh, of course people run off with the bitcoins all the time, it's just like cash". That's a silly comparison. In the minds of its defenders, bitcoin is "like cash" when defending its ability to be stolen, "like checks" when defending its really long transaction times, "like fiat currency [as envisioned by someone with no trust at all in the banking system]" when dealing with the fact that it's a centralized currency, and "like any other commodity" when dealing with the fact that it has massive value fluctuations. But it's not like any of these things- it just takes the shitty parts of all of them, checks all the boxes, and off it goes.

> Bitcoin can be easier to use than dealing with a bank

Really can it? I mean, if Alice wants to pay Bob 2 Bitcoin:

Optional Step 1A: Alice buys bitcoins from someone else, or some exchange, or whatever. This often involves a bank.
Optional Step 1B: Alice instead buys bitcoins in person, setup like some kind of strange drug deal. These appear to be safe... so far...

Step 2: Alice has bitcoins. If Alice has them in an exchange, Alice must log into the exchange, which is more or the same complexity than keeping them in a bank, and issue the transfer to Bob. If Alice has them in her wallet, she can transfer them directly, but her wallet has to have been synced up with every transaction in the history of bitcoin, a ledger that grows constantly.

Step 3: Wait for confirmation, which can take anywhere from several minutes to several hours. If you wait for some preliminary thing, Alice could have been just spoofing the transaction, and if you wait for the whole thing it can take just ANY long amount of time (and the people keeping this system are financially motivated to make the queue take along time, to get those fees).

> Bitcoin largely eliminates banks as middlemen
Installing some anonymous future thieves guild is not a particular improvement. Nor is this often true, unless you are exchanging bitcoin in person.

Re:Bitcoin is already "real for business"

[AchilleTalon]

Exactly, banks are staring at the blockchain for international transactions. The blockchain will enable them to transfer funds at a fraction of the cost today. The worldwide infrastructure needed for international funds transfer is costing billion of dollars per year. The blockchain will enable them to save almost all this money for international transfers between financial institutions.

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?

Re:Incentive?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Securities clearing - the process of making sure that when you click the button to buy something, you get it, and the person who sold it to you no longer has it, without either of you having to care about each other's creditworthiness, nor even your respective brokers' respective creditworthinesses - is really, really, complicated. And slow (days, batch-processing taking place overnight.) And expensive. Its procedures date back almost a century, to the days when everything was done on physical share certificates with numbers on them and handwritten signatures.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-07-14/banks-forgot-who-was-supposed-to-own-dell-shares

And it still sometimes breaks.

Re:Incentive?

[Aaden42]

To the degree that banks actually pay tax (LOL...),should they find any technique to do ${taxable_thing} without incurring taxes, you can rest assured that oversight will be temporary at best. Laws will be amended to ensure revenue continues to flow to government.

See also: Bitcoin appreciation is taxable as capital gains in many jurisdictions.

Re:Incentive?

[shaitand]

Imagine changing the system to extend the block chain (with the transactions voted on by consensus the same as regular bitcoin transactions) and the extensions triggered automatically when the average transaction gets too small. Now each major national bank operating as large a mining operation as their nation can afford.

You now have a global currency with no nation having to trust another to value it's currency, they instead build the biggest farms they can and increase the transaction processing power at the same time. No more china cheating on the value of their currency or hidden us inflation. No more nations having to use US currency to buy oil or trust a nation to value it's currency appropriately and off debts between nations in money the debtor can simply print.

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.

It's not a cryptocurrency, it's a ledger for USD

[raymorris]

This isn't a cryptocurrency. It's a securely signed ledger for the transactions the banks are already doing. Many times each day, Wells Fargo sends money to Bank of America, BOA borrows from Chase, Chase pays back a loan from Barclays, Barclays pays Wells Fargo (completing the circle) , etc. There's a lot of paper work, computer processing, and transaction costs and delays in moving that money around the circle. A block chain might, in some cases, might be a more efficient or effective way to record some of those transactions rather than the current computer system.

> people don't want banks in control of money

The line at the bank, the people standing there waiting to hand their money to the bank, suggests otherwise. Regardless, this article is about the banks using a blockchain to record transactions among themselves . Surely the banks want the banks to be in control of their own monetary transactions.

 

Re:So, anyone remember where AOL came from?

[UnknowingFool]

So America OnLine (among others) was created, and aggressively sold to consumers. And it provided "internet". Sort of. It was a very walled garden. But you did start seeing "AOL Keyword: MOVIE TITLE" and such in advertising and on TV. In the long term, how well did that work out?

While I don't disagree that corporate America does some shady things, America Online wasn't created for control of the internet. At the time, the Internet had few controls; it also had few directions. The world wide web was not what it is today. How would the average person get news without knowing to navigate newsgroups (by text commands)? How would someone use email (by text commands)? AoL was gated but it also presented the average consumer with a better UI to use the internet. Point and click controls instead of a console and text commands. Like every other company, AoL was trying to make money on the Internet by being the gateway for average people.

Re:They fail to see what's special about Bitcoin

[Zak3056]

ACH:
Cheap
slow
US only. (The Eurozone has something similar)

The Eurozone calls them "wire transfers" and they are not expensive--expensive wires are a US thing.

Whenever I explain that the US still largely runs on checks to my European and Chinese colleagues, they look at me like I have three heads. When I explain ACH to them (which still runs on checks) they think I'm either full of shit, or that the guys who designed our banking systems are fucking lunatics.