Balancing miners borks blockchains, say boffins The financial sector's enthusiasm for blockchain technology might be misplaced, according to a pair of Australian distributed computing experts. The problem: if everyone in a consortium trusts each other, they don't need blockchains to protect themselves; if they don't, current blockchain protocols have a flaw that allows a …
this is against POW systems only.
I am yet to see any "enterprise" or "banking/financial" blockchains proposing to use POW.
As such, the first line of the El Reg article, ("The financial sector's enthusiasm for blockchain technology might be misplaced, according to a pair of Australian distributed computing experts") is total bollocks.
Blockchain has value. POW does not. And I probably will never understand why academics continue to focus on POW when industry does not (AFAICT) care.
I cannot see why you had a downvote. I read the article waiting for the relevant application of the attack. I had the same thoughts, POW systems (aka mining) are for digital currency using blockchains. Blockchains are useful for so much more than digital currency and does not require POW mining.
Then I thought maybe some think banks are considering using blockchains for "digitizing" currency. That could be an explanation for the downvote.
Actually, the problem isn't quite what that sounds like. It isn't about whether *we* can trust *them* (although that is obviously an issue), but whether they think *they* can trust *each other*. (And the LIBOR scandals show that that *is* an issue, of course. As does this paper.)
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