A couple of thoughts:

These "blockchain" analyses tend to minimize the role of related technologies, such as identity management and access control, and of knock-on effects resulting from, for instance, harmonization of the record format, of the functions and of the legal text.  If we recontextualize "blockchain," it is busting down the proprietary door to banking and finance software, and all the other technologies can follow.  "Financial technology" becomes simply "technology," technology that is open source.

Borrowing from the Barclays' smart templates vocabulary and Thomas's use case, the layers seem to be:

1. Records, which can be:

  1.1. parameters (transaction particulars and paradigms)

  1.2. prose (framing - legal, descriptive and other human-readable text)

  1.3. code (functions - "smart contracts" - text that computers like to read)

2. synchronization of records

3. execution of code

4. management of collections of records (notably access control)

5. validation of the veracity of collections of records.

 

"Blockchains," in the technical sense provide advantages primarily in layer 5, but "blockchains" in the movement sense highlight the advantages of using common approaches to the other layers.  Blockchains in the technical sense are suboptimal (or even unusable) in some of the other layers, notably in management of records.  It is hard to see how blockchains can be reconciled with, for instance, the privacy requirements of the GDPR. 

 

http://kantarainitiative.org/confluence/display/BSC/Privacy-Preserving+Data+Sharing

Banking is a particularly important use case, that we might wish to consider.  The EU Payment Services Directive mandates banking APIs.  Banks are, I am told, extremely concerned about data security and fraud, as well as worried about the competitive effects.

To demonstrate a vision of "open sourced" financial services in a format that is compatible with blockchains but not dependent on them, I improved on a "bank chain" demo I did in France.  This demo is very dense - (not the first time that that can be said of my work) - but it shows a flow of drafting, signature and validation of a payment instrument (check), and has stubs for specifying consequences that need to be implemented in code (a kind of loose-text SCDL - smart contract definition language).  

This is neither legal nor coding advice, and is certainly wrong in all particulars, but it may help convey the general idea - that open source (blockchain in context) can permit the financial sector and its customers (most of us) to be treated as a decentralized file system, nodes in a "graph." 

 

http://www.commonaccord.org/index.php?action=doc&file=bqc/fr/bnpp/a5we/Account/Check/00001/06-Accept.md

 

 

On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 4:14 PM, John Wunderlich <john@wunderlich.ca> wrote:

If I were to pick at that nit, I would suggest "mistrust somewhere in the chain of transactions"

Thanks, John
4giv spellin errurz from mobile devize

_____________________________
From: j stollman <stollman.j@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2016 12:30 PM
Subject: Re: [DG-BSC] WEF Report
To: John Wunderlich <john@wunderlich.ca>
Cc: Thomas Hardjono <hardjono@mit.edu>, <dg-bsc@kantarainitiative.org>

John,

This list provides some valuable insight.  

The only thing I would change is the Item 3:  Minimal Trust.  My correction is nitpicky, but I would change "mistrust between entities: to "mistrust among entities."  Often the two parties transacting trust each other.  The trust breakdown is further up or down the transaction chain.  "Among" captures this more accurately than "between."

Jeff

---------------------------------

Jeff Stollman

stollman.j@gmail.com

+1 202.683.8699

Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out.

Science advances one funeral at a time.

                                    Max Planck

On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 6:27 AM, John Wunderlich <john@wunderlich.ca> wrote:

Here's the page that leapt out at me - characteristics of high potential use cases

John Wunderlich,

Sent frum a mobile device,
Pleez 4give speling erurz

"...a world of near-total surveillance and endless record-keeping is likely to be one with less liberty, less experimentation, and certainly far less joy..." A. Michael Froomkin

On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 5:13 AM -0400, "Thomas Hardjono" <hardjono@mit.edu> wrote:

This might help us in some of our use cases:http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_future_of_financial_infrastructure.pdf/thomas/_______________________________________________DG-BSC mailing listDG-BSC@kantarainitiative.orghttp://kantarainitiative.org/mailman/listinfo/dg-bsc

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