Bank of Canada finds flaws with current blockchain solutions

What a surprise!

The Banks find that a competing payment system is not as good as using a Bank - hardly unbiased research...

No there isn't a small probability

'...as there is "always a small probability that the payment could be reversed"'

Yeah, and there's always a 'probability' that in a homeopathic dilution of something, you might actually find one of the original molecules. Don't count on it though.

A blockchain transaction sitting thousands of of blocks deep isn't getting reversed in the lifetime of this universe. And they're idiots to equate a homeopathic level probability to what a man in the street assumes by the term probable.

payments are reversed/recalled more often that you would think

Banks make the same mistakes as consumers (albeit the numbers are bigger and frequency far reduced).

even a tiny fraction of a percentage of reversals in 24 hours could be many hundreds of thousands of transactions for some banks.

Its secure... right?

If you have a system that is based on two different types of cryptology, you need to test it by dropping both to some thing silly like AES-512 keys but they are all 0000...0 to 0000...00ff and then make your hashs only return 256 values. Now you only have 65536 combinations to play with and you can see what happens when someone breaks it. Block chains gets very wobbly when someone breaks them. If you add in the fact that "no one can break it" and add that to the level of trust, your asking for a disaster in the future.

FIFY

Not an option for underpinning payment systems at present

cough

in South Africa there is a saying "tell a man to beat a dog and he will find a stick" - this tech is just getting started. Furthermore, word on the street is that top talent in large finance firms have moved onto "blockchain" tech startups, which is increasing the gravity to that sector.