Name a single bank who is using blockchain in an essential component of their operations (not just a proof of concept). Go on, I'll wait.
Sure, blockchain is "interesting" and the people involved are "brilliant" but where is it delivering a 10x improvement over the status quo?
Blockchain is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem.
What a ridiculous argument. With blockchain really just becoming interesting over the last 2 years, you think banks, many of which use systems 20-30 years old (bonds are still primarily traded over phone) are going to switch over to it immediately. Give me a break.
> Sure, blockchain is "interesting" and the people involved are "brilliant" but where is it delivering a 10x improvement over the status quo?
International bank transfers can take days, have large transaction fees, and have a non-trivial amount of book keeping error. Whenever those same transactions could take 30 minutes with no human oversight I'd say the speedup is much higher than 10x. With that, it seems like you're more interested in making claims without being properly educated on what you're talking about.
Whatever problems you may have with international bank transfers, they work: every business in the world relies on them. For all the supposed benefits of blockchains, no blockchain solution can make that claim, or any claim close to it.
We could make a million of such transactions per minute using $1000/month hosted server. We have the technology.
The problem is legacy infrastructure and the fact that banks benefit from high fees on international transfers.
There is at least one successful business (transferwise) that makes international transfers much cheaper and faster using terribly inefficient work-arounds.
If banks were at all motivated to fix the issue, they would, using Java and a database. They don't need blockchain (which, btw, is slower to settle a transaction than updating a record in a database).
It is not like the problem hasn't been attacked many times from different angles.
But I agree with you that "Blockchain is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem" assuming you're talking about the hijacked usage of "blockchain".
> Name a single bank who is using blockchain in an essential component of their operations (not just a proof of concept). Go on, I'll wait.
I think this is exactly the point. Banks trying to employ their own blockchain is the same as companies trying to employ "Intranet" when the Internet first came out. It won't work.
I'd say that bitcoin has already succeeded, just not for the use cases that the author cares about.
It's not a matter of caring. He points out that whatever uses blockchain has (or hasn't) proven successful for, don't amount to a significant economic (or social) contribution. He's talking about objective quantity, not subjective quality.