&gt; First of all, a very important philosophical point to make is that there is no system in the world that offers truly 100% settlement finality in the literal sense of the term. If share ownership is recorded on a paper registry, then it is always possible for the registry to burn down, or for a hooligan to run into the registry, draw a “c” in front of every “1” to make it look like a “9”, and run out.<p>This is a disingenuous straw-man argument.  Of course <i>paper</i> records can never offer settlement finality, but a centralized <i>cryptographic</i> system certainly can (or, at least, it can offer settlement finality with confidence equal to that of the underlying cryptographic system).