A healthy dose of skepticism is well, healthy. As for The Economist , their opinion is pretty much in lockstep with much of the world’s biggest industries that have been predicted to be ripe for adoption of blockchain technology. With specific mention of the financial and banking industry, the editorial goes into why blockchain technology may be a slowly adopted innovation.
In the editorial, the author points to the hyper-competitive nature of financial firms and banks as being a hindrance to the proliferation of blockchain technology. Due to the lack of cooperation between the world’s biggest banks, having blockchain technology embraced by one big bank, while it might make them appear innovative and cool, won’t make a large impact on the industry as a whole until many different banks all start working together to change very long-standing practices of moving, managing and making money.
The piece also aims skepticism at the scalability of blockchain. In what appears to be an allusion to their opinion about Bitcoin’s current scaling issues associated with the block-size debate and delayed transaction times, the piece talks about how this would be an unacceptable liability for big industry players to undertake. The piece also displays some doubt in the current security of blockchain technology based on the lack of private blockchains being developed compared to public shared ledgers.
It’s clear that the piece does save a glimmer of hope in the development and applications of blockchain technology just not within the next decade or so. They believe that even though the finance industry stands to benefit greatly from the technology, some other industry will likely pave the path and prove its viability first. It makes sense from a point of view that financial institutions are typically highly reactive and risk-averse. Companies like
It makes sense from a point […]
