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Comment by dahdum | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the press and mindshare goes to the public blockchains like Bitcoin, but a ton of investment and work is being done on decentralized ledgers and solutions for financial institutions.

Digital Asset Holdings[1], for example, is building a distributed ledger for Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) to process post-trade settlement using HyperLedger.

[1] https://digitalasset.com/

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>decentralized ledgers and solutions for financial institutions

So is it decentralized or is it centralized to a company? You can't have both. It also isn't decentralized if you can mute/alter transactions. You're assuming people will allow you to use their computers/servers for free to run your transactions.

Distributed ledgers are one ledger shared by all parties, untrusted and using some form of voting.

Decentralized ledgers are multiple copies of the ledger shared among mostly trusted parties.

Financial institutions are far more likely to use decentralized ledgers for their projects.

Why is this better than what already exists?

Post-trade settlement is a very manual and time consuming process, a new solution built on a distributed ledger has the potential to drastically cut costs and reduce settlement time.

For a financial institution, why is the blockchain better than existing distributed systems like paxos or gossip protocols?

I'm not an expert in those protocols, but since the blockchain is essentially just a shared ledger, it maps cleanly to their existing needs.

Why are distributed protocols necessary in the first place? I know nothing about this space.

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