Free advice can be valuable… but only if you take it

Richard Gendal Brown

If a client tells you your solution doesn’t solve their problem, it may not be the problem that needs to change…

I often argue for the importance of blockchain and distributed ledger technology by using the following chain of logic:

• Bitcoin’s architecture solved the problem of censorship-resistant digital cash
• But few, if any, financial firms are interested in censorship-resistant digital cash
• So why are they looking at this technology?
• Because some principles underpinning Bitcoin’s architecture – shared ledgers, for example – could be relevant to problems that banks face.

Sure, a blockchain or a replicated shared ledger could indeed be useful to banks. Perhaps it could reduce the need for reconciliation between firms if they all ran off a single ledger, for example. But this says nothing about whether blockchains are the optimal solution to any particular problem in banking.  That still has to be argued, of course.

Recall: the…

View original post 624 more words