I really don't get the point of a blockchain in these situations where you start with a hard requirement for a central authority.
What advantage does this offer over a normal database ledger, in this situation?
What advantage does this offer over a normal database ledger, in this situation?
If not, this is just a database transaction with bells and whistles.
No
> Are they really allowing third parties to mine blocks outside of their own servers?
No
> If not, this is just a database transaction with bells and whistles
Bitcoin is just a database txn with bells and whistles.
JPM are making use of the time ordering immutability aspects of "traditional" blockchain tech. They're using normal distributed consensus on that because they don't need to solve the Byzantine Generals problem. They also have split public and private portions of the txns. They don't distribute the latter. I doubt even the public parts are distributed to non-participating parties (except maybe regulators) but I haven't looked that hard at it.
All seems reasonable to me. And sure one could build time ordered immutability with Paxos consensus on top of an Oracle DB but why would you? It's not a particularly relational problem and a chunk of it already exists in open source. Which is presumably why they built on top of go-ethereum.
All a crypto currency is, is a public append only database. There is no need to overcomplicate this.
There are lots and lots of reasons why a transparent append only database could be useful.
A public SQL database (which only they can alter) works just as well.
It becomes a blockchain when JPM allows third-party, anonymous actors to mine the blocks and take control of the network, which JPM is certainly not going to do.
A Blockchain is just a public append only database that multiple people have a copy of.
Despite people incorrectly thinking that this I'd a break concept, lots of things in the world follow this pattern, and it has been useful for a very long time.
The method of "commiting" things to a Blockchain have nothing to do with proof of work, or mining or whatever. You can "commit" things to Blockchains in many different ways.
GitHub, for example, allows owners of a repository to designate specific users with the permissions to "commit" code to their repo/Blockchain (which just happens to represent source controlled code, in their case).
But there could be lots of ways of determining what is the next block in that Blockchain.
If we're talking semantics now: Do people think, 'Oh, that's a blockchain!' when they think about Git? Is JPM building a new code repository?
And just because JPM isn't following the exact same formula that other people are following, doesn't mean that an append only public database is useless to them.
Lots of people have used append only public databases for all sorts of things, for decades. (My example being Git).
To give another example, Git arguably a Blockchain. (Public append only database, that everyone has a copy of).
Are you going to argue that Git is useless? It is exactly the same as any other Blockchain.