The Blockchain Revolution Gets Endorsement in Wall Street Survey

The actual Bitcoin network (7 transactions per second maximum worldwide) is insufficiently fast enough to conduct settlement of one player of a stock market simulation trading with 5 bots in a tutorial level. Reports of Wall Street adopting it for settlement purposes seem slightly optimistic.

I&#x27;m not sure I understand the point of using a blockchain in securities trading? I mean, it&#x27;s not like it would actually have any of the advantages of Bitcoin[1]. You&#x27;ll still need to settle accounts periodically (transfer money&#x2F;stock certificates&#x2F;etc). Those things aren&#x27;t going to go away.<p>Once the parties need to trust each other for that, they might as well cut costs by pooling money and buying a centralized order-matching system. That is, make exactly the thing they already have today.<p>[1]-I don&#x27;t think those advantages are all that great either, but that&#x27;s beside the point. The point is they don&#x27;t even apply here!

Given that most Bitcoin mining is done behind the Great Firewall[1], what happens if a midlevel bureaucrat partitions the network? (inadvertently or not) Seems there&#x27;d be a greater partion behind the firewall, and a lesser partition outside the firewall.<p>How does the protocol deal with that? Assuming it&#x27;s partitioned for days, weeks, or months?<p>[1] Chun Wang comment from <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;comments.gmane.org&#x2F;gmane.comp.bitcoin.devel&#x2F;8001" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;comments.gmane.org&#x2F;gmane.comp.bitcoin.devel&#x2F;8001</a><p>&quot;Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your turn. If Western miners do not find a China-based VPN into China, or if Western pools do not manage to improve their connectivity to China, or run a node in China, it would be them to have higher orphans, not us. Because we have 50%+.&quot;

This is obviously a trivial point, but the word blockchain seems to have lost its definite article.<p>eg (from the linked article): &quot;Last month, Symbiont, which plans to use blockchain to make ...&quot;<p>&quot;Other firms investigating finance-related uses of blockchain ...&quot;

&gt; Eighty-four percent of respondents said blockchain could reduce the risk a trade won’t settle and the time that process takes, while 74 percent said it could alleviate the chance your counterparty to a trade won’t make good on the deal.<p>Karma to anyone who can explain this to me. How does the blockchain reduce counterparty risk. The counterparty can either produce the required shares or they can&#x27;t.<p>And to be honest, currently cash equities settle on a T + 3 days basis and options settle on a T + 1 day basis. Most people view that as a feature not a bug.<p>If the markets wanted instantaneous settlement of cash equities they could do it, no one does.

Saying you think something is possible is not an endorsement. When Wall Street professionals <i>actually try it</i>, that is an endorse.

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