Bank of America trying to load up on patents for the technology behind Bitcoin
Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I think Bitcoin is an amazing technical (and economic) wonder.<p>But after starting (and quitting) a BTC business with a guy, and getting a BTC-related patent with another guy, I&#x27;ve come to the conclusion that blockchain technologies are a solution looking for a problem, and the only current problem being solved is how to illegally move money.<p>This is of course a standard thing to say for someone who&#x27;s just come across BTC (like a savvy old businessman friend of mine) but I&#x27;ve actually looked at the code, talked to people who wanted BTC (a couple of nerds and an army of drug dealers &#x2F; drug customers), and so on for a long while.<p>All the blockchain uses I&#x27;ve come across have seemed to be bolt-on hype motivated rather than genuine uses of the technology. I&#x27;m even doing a standard web project for a guy who thinks it will be useful to keep track of stuff in containers. I come from the finance industry, so I think I also know a bit about the requirements there, and they don&#x27;t need it.<p>So let&#x27;s look at what blockchain technology lets you do:<p>1) You get an indelible wall that grows every 10 minutes. You can write whatever you like on it. Well, that&#x27;s great but you can do that with a normal database. It&#x27;s well known how to do it, there&#x27;s backup processes, security, various consistency measures, scaling, and so on that are established.<p>2) You don&#x27;t need to run your own database. This is great if you don&#x27;t want the network to be closed due to malfunction or police intervention. But banks already know how to run a database, they have hordes of people doing that. And they have to comply with information requests from the authorities. And someone, somewhere needs to have all the records, which they will want compensation for. I suggest AWS and the likes (in house), running an old fashioned DB would require orders of magnitude less compensation for similar amounts of traffic.<p>3) The network automates the ledger system so we don&#x27;t need as many back office staff. Well, there&#x27;s no magic here. If you write a blockchain for securities operations, the logic still needs to be written by someone. There&#x27;s existing protocols for this kind of stuff, and there&#x27;s existing automation at the banks for processing this stuff. Even if you decide to go blockchain, you will have to meet with the other banks to make sure everyone agrees so they&#x27;ll want to be on the same chain. You&#x27;re still going to need back office staff to make sure the inputs and outputs make sense.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;ve yet to see a blockchain use that both requires and is improved by using the blockchain.