this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (20 children)

The Blockchain is amazingly useful, that's why the establishment did their best to make sure people associate with incels and little monkey pictures to ruin its credibility. A banking system running on Blockchain is one where the Pentagon can't lose trillions of dollars annually.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago (14 children)

A banking system running on Blockchain

Is an astronomically terrible idea. It:

  • would use as much electricity as an entire country
  • payments/transfers would be both much slower AND much more expensive than via a bank
  • would have no protection against fraud. You got scammed? Your money's gone. You paid for something online and it never arrived? Too bad
  • would have no way to stop money laundering
  • would have no way to help people who forgot their password, they'd just lose their life savings permanently
  • would tie up a bunch of capital, preventing reinvestment and growth. There would be no way to get a bank loan to buy a house for example
  • the list goes on
[–] RedDoozer -3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

All your points are about an obsolete idea of Bitcoin, a PoW public blockchain. A PoS private blockchain with private keys not handled by the users would invalidate your entire list.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You mean PoS, which feature is literally that the more you have, the more you can stake, and the more you can earn in return? So basically the system that has built-in wealth concentration?

[–] RedDoozer 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yes, but if we are talking about a private permissioned blockchain, there's no need to obtain returns from staking. It can be even a Proof of Authority tokenless network for what banking care.

Banks are already paying for servers to process and store information. A few validators or collators (quite cheap for a private network) provided by several banks would cost a fraction of what they pay now and they'll keep owning the data, they could reverse transactions, be covered by several layers of public encryption, guard the user's wallet/login, etc.

Don't mix blockchain with the speculative world built on top of it. That's only an unfortunate use of the technology.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Banks are already paying for servers to process and store information.

Yes

A few validators or collators (quite cheap for a private network) provided by several banks would cost a fraction of what they pay now

How? They'd be doing extra compute work for no reason (validating already valid transactions), and storing extra data (lots of hashes) for no reason, so it can only make infra costs more expensive. Plus the added complexity meaning you have to hire an extra team just to understand it.

Don't mix blockchain with the speculative world built on top of it. That's only an unfortunate use of the technology.

That speculative world as shitty as it is, is the only proven use case of the technology, if you take that away then blockchains are even less useful

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

PoS centralizes the authority to whoever is richest. That’s literally worse than how paper currency with semi corrupt government works.

[–] RedDoozer 1 points 1 month ago

The PoS option was to highlight that power consumption doesn't have to be an issue. Of course, PoS has its own issues.

The network can use any other type of proof, like Proof of Authority where only a buch of validators owned by the banking system can process the transactions. The network can be even tokenless, no profit or incentives from it, just the secure architecture.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

All my points? That's a bit rich

You make a good point that PoS would solve one of the issues I raised which is electricity usage.

In theory it could also increase throughput and reduce costs, but: a) in practice that hasn't happened yet despite years of development, b) it's never going to be as efficient as a centralised system because of the extra overheads necessary to decentralise it, so that point still stands

All my other points still stand as well, plus the additional problems PoS creates to do with centralisation of power

[–] RedDoozer 1 points 1 month ago

The keyword is "private." The redundant system all the banks maintain can be reduced to a private, permissioned blockchain, creating a network for the banking system to handle their own transactions in addition to a seamless inter-bank communication.

I doubt a network for just one bank can be that useful compared to the current situation.

Also, I'd say that every bank has (had?) a team researching the blockchain.

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