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maaku

These banks aren't talking about _Bitcoin_ block chain.

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Perhaps you'd like to define what a blockchain means outside the context of Bitcoin?

Is SCP a Blockchain? Is Hyperledger? Is Tendermint?

Is every database that uses a replicated log a blockchain?

Are Certificate Transparency logs blockchains? Do Merkle trees count as blockchains?

It's a meaningless term that was never used or defined in the Bitcoin paper.

What about, and this is an attempt: "A Merkle tree of transactions signed using an elliptic curve digital signature and validated using a consensus algorithm"

You need truth to be objective in order to be a blockchain. There's no mention of pow in that definition. If every single node in the Bitcoin network went down but one, and 99% of the network were "lying" then we'd still know the "truth". That is what a blockchain does. These voting databases are silly decades old technology

Distributed, log-based systems... old tech... can do that on fault-tolerant hardware in near real-time with no waste from mining. Necessary crypto accelerators already exist for those, too. Some systems in banking on mainframes or NonStop have been doing transaction processing with decades of uptime despite HW faults and hacker threats.

Compared to blockchains, variations on old approach seem better from the tech efficiency to field results.

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