> and therefore not actually decentralized

> The Quorum blockchain has been tested with other major companies including Goldman Sachs and the National Bank of Canada

It is sort of decentralized. but the access is not open to everyone. Most banks aren't comfortable with putting all their eggs in the basket that could end up under someone else's control. Decentralized doesn't really make the bank feel at ease when they back up their coin by trillions of their own money. They'll want some guaranteed form of control.

The purpose is actually to bypass SWIFT and their network with a network that is completely under the bank's control.

Maybe "base that stores data"?

Public and decentralized are not necessarily the same thing. Even if just two other banks join in, under an equal footing of ownership of the proof of work, its no longer centralized. I think assuming "all blockchain tech must be used only for situations with anonymous participants" is unimaginative gatekeeping. There is plenty of room to reimagine business process workflows between consenting participants, that doesnt at all hinder the public coin marketplace, or infringe or harm principled stands trying to change the world. These arent coins a single human bank customer would ever hold or use, these are for institutional settlement.

A good example could be a construction project where the general and all the subs collaborate on a database, but no one company owns it.

The smart part of JP Morgan's plan here is scalability. It might be centralized now, but it can be trivially extended into becoming decentralized at the flick of a switch, without a redesign.

Microsoft already has pushed for a non-public-anonymous-participant private blockchain that has throughput of around 1600 transactions per second. https://medium.com/coinmonks/coco-framework-a-game-changer-i...