Daiwa to adopt blockchain for Myanmar stock trading

Daiwa to adopt blockchain for Myanmar stock trading(asia.nikkei.com)

47 points by ayanray 9 years ago | 21 comments

rtpg 9 years ago |

I started writing a furious "why would you even do this?"-style post, but this paragraph stood out:

>Blockchain technology shares transaction records with multiple computers. Stock trading is typically saved in servers at bourses, but records cannot be referenced when communications infrastructure fails.

>Using blockchain systems, brokerages can continue a minimum of operations, such as checking past transaction records and outstanding balances even when failures occur, although new transactions cannot be checked.

The "blockchain as a distributed transaction DB" concept is more interesting than I thought, and it's probably really easy to get started given all the bitcoin tech around.

Dylan16807 9 years ago | |

> The "blockchain as a distributed transaction DB" concept is more interesting than I thought

Not particularly. It's using the wrong tool for the job. A distributed database is helpful in many ways, but you don't need an attached proof-of-work system.

forgotpwtomain 9 years ago | | |

> Not particularly. It's using the wrong tool for the job. A distributed database is helpful in many ways, but you don't need an attached proof-of-work system.

Blockchain doesn't imply PoW. You could consider each block minted with e.g. a M of N signature scheme, in the case of a stock-trading system you don't need open anonymous/participation and it's quite fine to rely on trusted parties.

ayanray 9 years ago | | |

The way I understood the proof of work system is that it's there to determine which block is accepted as truth. So during a conflict, the first to solve the proof of work puzzle has their block accepted.

For distributed databases, when there are multiple conflicting transactions that touch the same data, I could see the proof of work as a method to determine which transactions win, especially in a global, multi-master model. When the proof of work puzzle is solved during conflicts, the transaction is accepted as truth and moves to a COMMITTED state. It seems kind of wasteful if you are paying for resources to solve challenges, but maybe there's a better way to decide who wins for trusted vs untrusted environments.

As an aside, Spanner I think acquires locks globally before writing. Maybe there's an interesting global-lock free model that just works using block chain, even if it's just for trusted parties (I.e. Google-internal).

rtpg 9 years ago | | |

Oh, you're right, I forgot about proof of work. I guess you can go in and remove proof of work to make a simpler blockchain. But then you're losing some of the plug-n-play aspects.

cma 9 years ago | |

Traditional offline storage can do that too, right?

eb0la 9 years ago | | |

Exchanges are a textbook case of a shared ledger. They have separate systems that must work in sync with very low latency between them: order processing, the ledger (for clearing) and price advertising.

The main advantage of a blockchain is with the ledger price advertising between exchange members comes free.

I guess they can even implement OTC markets between peers, but I am not sure how do they plan to work with dark pools where parties want anonimity. Maybe they will just implement an internal blockchain with APIs for anonymous trading.

rtpg 9 years ago | | |

well it's distributed, so just caching a DB is a bit of a tricky question. What are you going to be caching in your offline storage?

If you just used flat-file CSVs, and don't want to re-download the entire DB twice a day, you want to now come up with syncing strategies, merging strategies, and probably conflict resolution. If you just have a blockchain, then you get all of this for free (so long as your data fits the blockchain shape).

Though I imagine there's something else that can be used here as well...