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Bank Consortium Successfully Tests Bitcoin Tech (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: R3CEV, a startup dedicated to bringing blockchain technology to traditional finance, yesterday ran a successful test of transactions between 11 of the world's largest financial institutions. This represents a big step forward in bringing blockchain, the foundation for Bitcoin, to traditional banking. The test, which connected the banks on a private 'distributed ledger' using Microsoft's cloud-based Azure service, allowed participants to execute sample financial transactions instantly, globally, and without a centralized third-party clearing house. Participants included Barclays, BMO Financial, Credit Suisse, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, TD Bank, UBS, and UniCredit among other leading financial groups.
It's ok, you utter the word, the secret's out now... Anyone seriously looking at "blockchain" technology is considering using Ethereum (aka bitcoin 2.0), not Bitcoin, including R3 CEV in the linked article. The ability to script transactions in bitcoin is fairly limited and not flexible. Yes there are ongoing ventures and ideas to work around that: side-chains, blockstream, colored coins, rootstock, etc, but these are all non-existent for production use at this time. Ethereum launched 6 months ago and can be used now, although it has far less time in the open than bitcoin (6 months vs ~7 years), so from a security perspective, it still needs to prove itself. Meanwhile, research teams of organizations can start testing it. Where Bitcoin can disrupt the financial sector, Ethereum can disrupt finance and "everything" else.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.