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Ex-Google Engineer Launches Blockchain-Based System For Banks (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A former Google engineer, whose speech recognition software is used in more than a billion Android smartphones, has launched a company that uses blockchain technology to build a new operating system for banks. Paul Taylor, a Cambridge University academic with an expertise in artificial intelligence, speech synthesis and machine learning, started working on the system, called Vault OS, two years ago in a basement in London's Shoreditch district, known for being a tech start-up hub. The technology, which underpins the digital currency bitcoin, creates a shared database in which participants can trace every transaction ever made. The ledger is tamper-proof and transparent, meaning that transactions can be processed without the need for third-party verification. The system also negates the need for costly in-house data centers, as it uses cloud-based systems, which banks can use on a "pay-as-you-go" basis, which means that there is no single point of failure. Taylor said major high-street banks were spending around a billion pounds ($1.3 billion) a year on computer technology, much of which he said was being used for propping up the current "legacy" systems rather than on any innovative technology. The start-up has been working with about ten banks, Taylor said, at least one of which would be starting a trial using the new system in August. He expects the system to be up-and-running within about a year. In banking-related news, a Congressional report shows that China's spies hacked into computers at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) from 2010 until 2013 and American government officials tried to cover it up.
We should just leave the industry to itself, and let them sort out how to do stuff. Why should I be interested in a company launching a product that twenty other companies offer as well, knowing that in five years maybe three will still be around.
The Blockchain revolution of the banking sector is very important, centralized trust systems are a descendant of the "mainframe" model of the past. But why treat each of these companies like a messiah. There are tons of them.
I was about to mod him down. Even if he is making a point. How this post is related to the subject? So, it is surely offtopic. Then it will be mod down eventually.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Which won't prove the point you want to think it will. Mod martyrs always deserve their downmods.
I browse at -1. In my experience, meaningful, well-thought-out comments rarely end up at -1. Even if some disagree, others will agree, and things will balance out.
Posts that start with statements like "Moderators suck", however, usually end up marked as "troll" or "flame bait". Nobody is interesting in counterbalancing those kinds of statements, because they lack meaningful content.
TL;DR: Seems like the system works to me.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Jemima Kelly may not know what an operating system is but the submitter should.
Editors - please take a look at that summary and convert it into something that does not look so utterly stupid and ignorant.
I accept your challenge, nave! En garde!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Second reply, different than the first:
It's biased and leads to groupthink.
How, exactly, does the moderation system lead to groupthink? Are you imagining that all of slashdot agrees on any given point, and anyone who thinks different will be modded down? This doesn't seem very likely, given the heated debates that regularly take place here. Are you instead imagining that slashdot readers will eventually be corrupted by a single-sided point of view, and thus achieve groupthink? Because in order to do so, you would first have to succeed in having a single-sided viewpoint, which (as observed earlier in this post) is implausible, given the heated debates. So at first blush, it does not seem like there is a valid mechanism by which the moderation system could "lead to groupthink".
Just my opinion.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Of course you are full of shit, and furthermore.... Ah, I'll leave it at that.
Attn: Slashdot
Ignore that doofus. Due to built in limits your system actually mitigates mob like "group think".
And who modded this moron up? Oh, never mind. It would be the guy who posted it. Still, overall, the system works. Please don't change it.
Thank you
PS - Posting AC so my account doesn't get modded offtopic.. Ironical, ain't it?
The problem is that moderation really is effectively an agree/disagree system. Also, it's done behind the cover of anonymity, which doesn't make sense. Why not show who moderates a post?
Better yet, why not allow each logged-in user ten or 25 random posts they can moderate each day? It would eliminate the boost that early posts receive while longer posts that are well thought out and get posted later don't get modded up so much. It would also make it a lot harder for individual moderators to abuse the system because, ideally, each post would get moderated several times.
Then use statistics to identify moderators that are outliers and have someone manually review for abuse. There wouldn't be explicit metamoderation, but the system would be harder to abuse and moderators with strange behavior would eventually be caught.
On many issues, there's a prevailing point of view. See open source, piracy, encryption for examples. If you write a quality post that is contrary to the prevailing views, it's much harder to get modded up. You effectively create an echo chamber and moderation is a part of the process.
Because that will lead to an explosion of retarded little vendettas, but then I suspect that's what you want anyway.
Bullshit. Quality posts that contravene popular opinion get modded up a lot. The ones that get modded into oblivion are far more often the shitty ones that loudly congratulate themselves for being contrary.
Protip: If your post includes phrases like "sheeple", "hivemind", or "Go ahead and downmod me", then you are NOT making a quality post and you deserve every downmod you get - regardless of the topic or your opinion on it.
Actually, no, having users moderate 10 or 25 comments randomly each day would eliminate the need for such accountability. In principle, each post would be moderated by multiple users and a single user wouldn't be able to inflict much damage. But it has the ancillary benefit of ensuring that posts made later in a discussion are also moderated. Right now, early posts tend to get moderated frequently but good posts that take awhile to wrote come later and don't get moderated. This is especially true if you have an ongoing discussion. Moderation really doesn't do a good job of highlighting good posts right now. It would also ensure that posts that have been modded down are still seen by moderators. Abuses are more likely to be corrected in that instance. It would eliminate moderation wars where some comments get modded up or down a lot and others don't. It would prevent a single user from using an allotment of mod points to abuse moderation and damage another user's karma. And it's very close to how metamoderation is done now. I suggested that as an alternative to disclosing who moderated posts because, as you say, that information can also be abused.
If you're not willing to backup a moderation you don't deserve modpoints. It's puds like you that abuse them behind bs you just spewed that we all see right thru like it's clear glass.
So you've got this encrypted system that's kind of like a Usenet for transactions. I make a change locally, eventually it propagates across the world. The databases are on everyone's computers versus on several hundred servers like Usenet.
The "distributed ledger" is supposed to be the Next Big Thing. And I don't mean that with any sarcasm or negativity. But how well will it scale really, if the ledgers/databases are on people's computers instead of a network of several powerful servers connected by a fast backbone?
I'm a total tyro when it comes to the distributed ledger. I've never used Bitcoin. But it - the distributed ledger - seems hackable, with no recourse if you lose your stash. And its scalability seems limited.
Confirmation bias is real. People are more likely to see the good things in comments they agree with and the flaws in comments they disagree with. There isn't an easy solution to this because it's hard to objectively determine what comments are good. Trolls masquerade as good comments, which is how they succeed. It's likely that trolls would be able to defeat any system that attempted to objectively determine the quality of a post. That said, it's equally foolish to pretend that users' views on a topic doesn't influence how they moderate.
I'm not sure there's a good way to fix that bias in moderation. It is what it is. However, an overhaul to the system probably could solve some of the other problems that occur.
Present users with a random selection of recent posts and ask them to moderate. Each day, there's a fresh supply of posts to be moderated, the number of which depends on the karma of the account. Users with bad karma don't get to moderate at all. Users with slightly good karma get to moderate a few posts. Users with excellent karma get to moderate many more posts. Ideally, each post gets moderated more often and posts made later in discussions get moderated just as frequently as early posts. Therefore there's value in taking the time to make a well reasoned post rather than quickly posting something to get an early comment. Is also limits the damage a single user can cause, though that's not the primary benefit of such a system.
The article is content-free and makes no sense, as so many of these articles do. It's also barely longer than the "summary". At least this one didn't fall victim to the usual tech reporting failure of saying the blockchain is public. Still, the magical blockchain does not eliminate $1.2 billion in expenses. Far from it. If anything, their hardware expenses will go up, because they have to devote hardware to hashing, where before, a financial transaction was a straight-forward database transaction. They still have to keep track of everything they keep track of now, plus hash. Now, they can control and explicitly cap the amount of hashing required to drive the system, since they're not limited to the Bitcoin implementation, but there still has to be work done, i.e. processing.
Here's the nonsensical part though:
The start-up has been working with about ten banks, Taylor said, at least one of which would be starting a trial using the new system in August.
At least one? You mean at least two. One bank doesn't need a blockchain at all. The controls required to prevent internal fraud are quite simple when you know everything there is to know about both sides of the transaction. It's when one party of the transaction has an account at a different bank that a blockchain comes in. The banks are hoping to disintermediate the Automated Clearing House (in the US) and the Pan-European Automated Clearing House (with the cutesy PE-ACH acronym). In practice, they're going to discover that sufficient hashing to secure 100 billion transactions per year (ACH+EPN+PE-ACH) is neither free nor even cheap. It remains to be seen if hashing expenses can be kept below ACH fees.
Why the shit do you always reference other posts that are sitting on the front page, usually only one article below, from every fucking non-related story? This is the first one I've seen where you referenced something that someone other than yourself posted.
Stop with your attempted click driving shit.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
It mentions a blockchain AND cloud computing in one go. Who won at buzzword bingo on this one?
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
You said "back up a moderation".
You meant "let me follow you around for a week shrieking at you because you downmodded my retarded comment".
And no, I don't abuse moderation. Let go of your sad little persecution complex.
Here's a much better article explaining why fundamental issues with blockchains make them either unsuitable for banking or not much different than the current system of trusted third parties in a centralized permission system. Read this and beware of fintech cheerleaders spouting buzzword nonsense:
Will Blockchain Change Wall Street? The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
Nihil sub sole novum
I wonder who's gonna be the smart cookie that uses something like AWS to spin up a few thousand micro instances, installs the banking client on them and then uses their 50.00001% influence to transaction all the currency into their accounts..
He added "hacked" at the end for no discernible reason.
> participants can trace every transaction ever made
All the more reason to keep using Cash ! I don't want my wife knowing that I finish work early and go to the pub for an hour every evening.
it's just the usual propaganda and BS that this BeauHD feels obligated to propagate here on Slashdot.
Yeah, I'm sure they'll go for that and risk crippling fines if any of that data is compromised or even going out of business the "cloud" goes down and all transactions grind to a halt.
"Paul Taylor, a Cambridge University academic"
Says it all really. Very smart but little real world business experience and no common sense.
Is that why you're posting unidentifiably as anonymous coward and yet you have an account with modpoints? Sure you're willing to back up your words (sarcasm).
"The system also negates the need for costly in-house data centers, as it uses cloud-based systems, which banks can use on a "pay-as-you-go" basis, which means that there is no single point of failure. "
Which means you don't own your data, which means you can't change or migrate without being gouged if you are dissatisfied with the services.
Not that old mainframe stuff isn't useful, but let's leverage something modern for the next 50 years of computing and banking.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Why not show who moderates a post?
Given that you can't even be bothered to post under a pseudonymous user name in a conversation that isn't likely to get anyone fired, I am having trouble finding much empathy for your cause. More to the point, I'm the only one in this branch of the thread that isn't posting as AC.
When you come out from behind the AC cloak, maybe we can have a reasonable conversation on the topic.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Blockchains will be used for tracking YOUR transactions, but not the Banks.
On many issues, there's a prevailing point of view.
Prevailing != unanimous. Slashdot's moderation guidelines suggest browsing at -1 for exactly this reason: a moderator might very well represent a minority viewpoint, and moderating at -1 means that the minority viewpoint can still moderate worthwhile content upward.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.