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Microsoft Partners With Bank of America On Blockchain Trade Finance (securityweek.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the come-together dept.

wiredmikey quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Microsoft and Bank of America Merrill Lynch said they are working together to make financial transactions more efficient with blockchain technology -- the foundation of bitcoin digital currency. Blockchains are considered tamper-proof registers in which entries are time-stamped and linked to previous "blocks" in a data chain. As expected, the technology that drives the shadowy bitcoin cryptocurrency is drawing interest from the established banking industry, which sees a potential to revolutionize the sector. The companies said they will build and test frameworks for blockchain-powered exchanges between businesses and their customers and banks. Microsoft plans to use its Azure cloud service platform to enable blockchain transactions between a major corporate treasury and a financial institution. "Blockchains serve as public ledgers considered easy to audit and verify. They are also automated, speeding up transactions and limiting potential for error or revision," the report adds. The companies said that by using blockchain technology, they can digitalize and automate trade finance processes, which are traditionally highly manual, time-consuming and costly.

9 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Ah yes... by CaptSlaq · · Score: 2

    Because speed and automation didn't have any part in the previous fiscal downturn.

    1. Re:Ah yes... by H3lldr0p · · Score: 2

      But with this we'd be able to tell pretty quickly who started the market falling. All of the trades would be public readable. In theory.

      The question is when the law will catch up and allow legal liability to be assessed and assigned based on the record?

    2. Re:Ah yes... by kwbauer · · Score: 2

      So, the only financial transactions that any business engages in are securities trades? I guess I need to dig deeper to understand exactly how stock trades get involved in my employer making bi-weekly direct deposits into our (mine and my coworker's) accounts. I'll also ask my brother-in-law what stocks he is using to make payments to the corporation he is a franchisee of and to pay his food suppliers and such.

      Or maybe CaptSlaq and H3lldr0p should find some other deceased equines to pummel.

    3. Re:Ah yes... by cryptizard · · Score: 2

      It is actually not fast compared to most other things you would think of as "fast". It takes roughly 10 minutes to find each new block, and a transaction is usually not considered "confirmed" until 6 blocks in the chain have been found and agreed on. So it takes about an hour to confirm a transaction currently in Bitcoin, compared to a few seconds with a credit card.

  2. Re:ATM on your phone? by cryptizard · · Score: 2

    Already exists.

  3. Microsoft: Ha ha! by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 2

    Microsoft: I'm in ur bank, stealin' ur moneyz!!

    Trusting Microsoft with banking is like hiring John Wayne Gacy as your babysitter.

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  4. Oh great, just what we need... by jasonma84 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Microsoft trying to move in on another open source technology and trying to package, bundle and sell it off as their own... How refreshing. I am personally sick of Microsoft and Bank of America and think digital currency is better off without either of them. I know JP Morgan at one point was trying to move in on this territory as well but they couldn't figure out how to build a new digital currency without basically re-creating bit coin. What this really boils down to is control and inevitably will become mainstream when the government figures out how to regulate it and big banks figure out how to control it in order to issue new debt. Personally I would like to see more private exchanges from small startups and perhaps peer to peer loans leveraging bit coin. Not quite sure how to enforce people pay bit-coin loans back being anonymous, but I'm sure somebody will figure it out. Regardless, anything is better than the corrupt system we have in place so long as large corporations don't muck it up.

  5. Re:ATM on your phone? by cryptizard · · Score: 2

    But then Jack Bauer will show up to stop them. We are talking about TV right?

  6. This may explain ... by PPH · · Score: 2

    ... why Microsoft is building FPGAs into their Azure cloud servers. Get the jump on blockchain mining.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.