OK, so, it actually says:<p>"Basel-based BIS's Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure (CPMI), made up of central bankers from across the world, said it could challenge banks' role - but if the technology became widespread it was unclear who would then provide credit and savings facilities."<p>Emphasis: "but if the technology became widespread it was unclear who would then provide credit and savings facilities."<p>Having worked at a bank, they're interested because it could reduce the large role of simply making sure everybody's shit lines up at the end of the day between counterparties. This isn't the disruption you're dreaming of... It's not changing how capital and resources are directed and allocated throughout the economy... it's changing how those decisions get confirmed across systems.<p>It then goes on to say it could theoretically challenge the need for a central bank, as it's decentralized... this makes a huge, implicit assumption that a rule-based interest rate decision is desirable, which, I don't know, until we can have an actual way of knowing the natural interest rate and hand off analyzing the economy to algorithms, it may be best to leaving that to people who spend their lives devoted to that.
The Bitcoin blockchain, as implemented today:<p>- Takes over 10 minutes to come to consensus<p>- Cannot handle the transaction volume of a reasonably large retail company<p>- Loses accepted transactions!!! (blockchain forks, orphan blocks, etc) From a distributed database perspective the Bitcoin blockchain is broken and loses data: like a decentralized MongoDB, but slower by several orders of magnitude.<p>Articles like this are largely uninformed non-technical people responding to hype. They don't know what a replicated log is, let alone a Merkle tree.<p>There are many interesting distributed ledger technologies, like Stellar SCP, Hyperledger, and Tendermint.<p>The Bitcoin blockchain is ill-suited for this purpose.
This really has little to do with Bitcoin. A distributed ledger maintained by mutually mistrustful parties is useful for some back-end problems. The Bank for International Settlements, MERS, and Depository Trust Corporation are all candidates for replacement, because they're all just neutral parties that run clearing houses.<p>What we've learned from Bitcoin is that blockchain technology is robust enough to strongly resist attacks. If it were profitably breakable, it would have been broken by now. That it hasn't been is quite impressive.<p>As a settlement system, it doesn't require "mining" - just enough mutually mistrustful players that no one can tamper with logged transactions.