> Interbank nightly balance settlements between large institutions. A distributed cryptographic ledger would be great for this kind of thing. A private “coin” between mostly trusted partners with provisions for reversing transactions as needed.

But they’re already trusted partners who already have a functioning settlement mechanism that already has provisions for reversing transactions. Jamming a blockchain on top of this solves nothing not already solved.

The claim that this would reduce maintenance overhead is hogwash – we’ve seen an unending litany of unexpected bugs in blockchain protocols and smart contracts, while the existing transfer mechanisms are already debugged. Trustless mechanisms are harder to get right than trust-based ones, not easier.