The European Union's central bank today once again shot down the idea that it might use distributed ledger tech as part of its market infrastructure in the near future.
Published alongside the latest annual report from the European Central Bank, released on tuesday, was a feature on the tech. While largely written in broad strokes, the paper reiterates a position expressed in the past by ECB officials – namely, that the central bank isn't likely to tap distributed ledgers in the near future.
Do you think eurozone central banking should embrace distributed ledger technology?
It is not question whether they should or shouldn't - they simply cannot do it at all. How exactly would that work?
Blockchain which is not backed by significant number of hashing power is nothing more than glorified name for standard database.
Do you think that few government servers would be enough to provide serious level of security for this tech?
Because I can't imagine that central bank would share their database with citizens or allow them participate in this project.
You're talking about bitcoin blockchain not the blockchain technology.
They will not use a blockchain that requires people to hash, they will use an internal blockchain not a public one.
There will be no hashing the way we know it, there will be no reward block.
They just aim at replacing their internal databases with this. It will not affect the the way they deal with clients.
This is really similar to what I wrote few weeks before, that it's possible that the clients won't notice that anything has changed or not behind the scenes. Banks only needs to change the 'software' that runs in the background, people will use the same UIs. If banks start to use an international blockchain system, clearing the payments for themselves (not for the clients'), the clients will only notify anything if the process times becomes shorter. If the process times won't be shorter, blockchain technology could be still interesting for the banks if they can cut down some of the costs with this kind of new system.
One thing could be also interesting to banks, it's the POS network. Most of the banks have a lot of POS terminals at the merchants, shops, and if bitcoin becomes mainstream somehow, they can just update their POS terminals' software to accept bitcoin payments, and they can redirect the payments to given addresses. In this case, they can make some profit on the fees, because they already have the hardware, so it won't cost them more.