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tldr; this whole breakthru in technology called the blockchain isn't a new idea at all

I haven't read the article, and I been tired of blockchain hype for multiple years, but if this is an accurate tldr of the article, it isn't true at all. Blockchains are far more than simple shared ledgers. They're trustless shared ledgers, which is a huge leap forward from simple shared ledgers, and a pretty big deal for financial institutions, for whom dealing with trust issues is a major headache.

The point is that the trustlesness is not needed for the applications mentioned in the original report.

Also they probably don't want Proof of Work for its wastefulness.

Or, I'm sure, its relative slowness. LMAX can do millions of transactions per second. [1] Bitcoin is doing, what, 3 TPS? And I don't mean 3 million, just 3. (I get that from ~1600 transactions per block [2] and 1 block per 10 minutes.)

Back when I was doing trading systems, my traders would have murdered me if my response time graph looks like the Bitcoin one does. [3]

[1] http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

[2] https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block

[3] https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespa...

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