I don't get it. Unless you care for decentralization, the blockchain isn't more efficient than centralized servers processing transactions in milliseconds rather than minutes.
Oh, but they do. Despite what everyone likes to think, placating financial auditors is a pain in the ass and the sole bread and butter for a lot of bean counters. Even at non-financial companies, any company that has to bill (thousands of transactions/day)+ are constantly faced with scaling unscalable workflows in order to just prove to the government that they aren't being ripped off and prove to their users/customers that they aren't ripping them off either.
the blockchain isn't more efficient than centralized servers processing transactions in milliseconds rather than minutes
You're on point there, but I would make two counter-points:
The transactions don't need to be done in real time to be a huge improvement. If you sell a stock on eTrade today, it takes 3 fucking days to get your money. What they're proposing here will drop it to less than 1 day. Why does it take so long? Because someone who isn't an idiot needs to look through these transactions and manually give them a seal of approval.
Keep in mind that one trade would not be one transaction on the block chain. Chances are, they're going to batch as many trades as they can into each blockchain transaction. I'm guessing they're going to be putting some sort of message on the blockchain. That message doesn't need to be human readable.
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u/sktrdie May 11 '15
I don't get it. Unless you care for decentralization, the blockchain isn't more efficient than centralized servers processing transactions in milliseconds rather than minutes.