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kleinbl00  ·  3115 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Bitcoin is not an obvious choice for financial services.

I dunno, man. As far as the world is concerned, BTC is for ransomware and Silk Road purchases. Not only that, but your "large amount of computing power" is wholly and completely outside the hands of the interested players. More than that, the major countries all these banks operate in have ruled that BTC isn't a currency, it's a coupon, and banks print coupons all f'n day long.

If I'm "JP Morgan, State Street, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Suisse, BBVA and Commonwealth Bank of Australia" I'm rolling my own proprietary, locked-down, lives-on-my-servers blockchain that will never, ever ever be available to the public because if I get in the door first, maybe I can force Goldman Sachs to use my blockchain instead of the other way 'round.

And if I'm Goldman Sachs, I'm already in testing and ready to roll that shit out without so much as an announcement because I'm a vampire squid and that's how I roll.

My google tells me there's something like 15m BTC in circulation. My phone tells me they're worth about $230 at the moment. So my calculator tells me there's $3.4b worth of bitcoin out there. Goldman Sachs' market cap is over $80b. JP Morgan's is over $230b. Seems like very little reward for a whole lot of risk, considering a "family feud" free-association with the word "bitcoin" would give you "cryptolocker" "terrorism" and "Mount Gox."