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Comment by osrec | Hacker News Reader

Sort of, however it can bring full transactional traceability in a very transparent, open manner. That's better than what we have today. I mean, at a basic level even extracting your own account data from a bank is extremely tedious if you stay within their terms of use (i.e don't use yodlee etc)!

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Isn't most money used as purely digital anyway? When you get a mortgage, it's not like $300k of physical money changes hands.

So at a basic level quite a few (most) transactions are happening on a digital, abstract level anyway, so really the question is can blockchain be used to improve this model, and is there sufficient incentive for existing players to do so, or is there enough opportunity for someone else to come in and do so.

I think the former is what we're seeing banks start to explore today, while BTC and other cryptocoins have been exploring the latter.

Yes transactions are digital, but they are neither open nor transparent. The information itself is heavily guarded, as it essentially ring fences the competitive advantage of banks and stops plucky start ups coming in, adding value and thereby reducing the perceived value/utility of a traditional bank.

There are some proposals to have the 300k be actually created by the central bank.

For example the Vollgeld initiative in Switzerland: https://www.vollgeld-initiative.ch/english/

One of the logical extension is to allow anyone to have an account at the central bank, also combining those approaches with a blockchain sounds logical.

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