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Tag: blockchain

An experiment

An experiment

I said earlier that I have a theory that you can replace the term “distributed ledgers” with “shared Excel sheets” in about 90 percent of talk about blockchain and finance. I wasn’t joking.

“A shared Excel spreadsheet is a record of transactions or other data which exists across multiple distinct entities in a network. The spreadsheet can be wholly replicated across participants, or segments can be partially replicated across a subset of participants. In either case, the integrity of the data is ensured in order to allow each entity to rely on its veracity and to know that data they are entitled to view is consistent with that viewed by others entitled to view the same data. This makes the shared Excel spreadsheet a common, authoritative prime record — a single source of truth — to which multiple entities can refer and with which they can securely interact.”

That’s from a certain blockchain paper. You could tweak the language to make it a little more accurate – “password-protected Excel spreadsheets whose earlier entries cannot be edited” or some such, but the point stands. The reason it stands is because it highlights a major issue with blockchain technologies when it comes to finance — what problem are you trying to solve here?

Centralized databases have existed for decades. Blockchain might be modestly more efficient, but the notion that it’s completely immutable and can never be abused seems open to questioning.

Here’s Christopher Natoli and Vincent Gramoli as written up by The Register:

“The problem: if everyone in a consortium trusts each other, they don’t need blockchains to protect themselves; if they don’t, current blockchain protocols have a flaw that allows a bad actor to game the system.”