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Blockchain Platform Developed by Banks To Be Open-Source (reuters.com)
A blockchain platform developed by a group that includes more than 70 of the world's biggest financial institutions is making its code publicly available, in what could become the industry standard for the nascent technology, reports Reuters. From the article: The Corda platform has been developed by a consortium brought together by New-York-based financial technology company R3. It represents the biggest shared effort among banks, insurers, fund managers and other players to work on using blockchain technology in the financial markets. Blockchain, which originated in the digital currency bitcoin, works as a web-based transaction-processing and settlement system. It creates a "golden record" of any given set of data that is automatically replicated for all parties in a secure network, eliminating any need for third-party verification. Banks reckon the technology could save them money by making their operations faster, more efficient and more transparent. They are racing to build products using the technology that will generate new revenue, with dozens of patent applications filed for blockchain-based products by Wall Street's top lenders. R3 says it hopes its platform will become the industry standard, although its intention is indeed for firms to build products on top of it.
bitcoin pre-dates git. Linux Torvaldes has even said that he wrote git after reading a paper on bitcoin internals and realizing that it could apply to a content-addressable filesystem.
Long before Bitcoin, blockchains have been used in "eternal log files", "digital notaries" and "timestamping service" for at least 20 years. Torvald's first name is Linus.
Most industry standards I know are patented to hell and back. About 30% of every smartphone's cost is from patent royalties. If the patent is on some good technology, other companies will pay the royalty. Not all IP is rounded corner bullshit.
http://www.androidauthority.co...
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The big deal is about big transactions. This most likely isn't going to be used in the consumer credit card / debit card market, but more likely in the large purchase department. Buying a car/house? Waiting a few minutes vs hours/days for credit reports to return. Transferring millions/billions of dollars between accounts, who's auditing it? Blockchains significantly reduce the amount of work in this department while essentially eliminating fraud, since the dollars can be tracked from transaction to transaction.
Actually, this technology is targeted a contractual transactions in the financial realm (think bank cash claims, credit default-swaps, derivative securities that rely on precise timing, etc.). As far as I can tell, there no concept of proof-of-work or mining, but it's purely a distributed financial ledger concept for banks to use. The block chain concept and the chain history being held simultaneously held by multiple partner institutions simply makes the ledger un-eraseable (any corrections need to be recorded by future transactions, not erased). Unlike bit-coin, there isn't intended to be a single global ledger of all transactions everywhere, but a ledger per domain.