Building blocks: developing systems using distributed ledger technology

Building blocks: developing systems using distributed ledger technology:

"As the Bank of England mentioned in its Quarterly Report in September 2014 (see our previous article on virtual currencies), there seems to be significant 'next mover' advantage with block chain as it moves beyond the world of virtual currencies.

As it asks fundamental questions about the shape of settlement operations, the Bank of England is planning to make use of and gain from its next mover position, as seen in the "New Heart for a Changing Payments System" speech by Minouche Shafik. Quite an endorsement, so we anticipate other regulators, such as the UK's Payments Systems Regulator, will spark debate about the use of block chain technology in their field.

Block chain's method for recording data to form a digital ledger (of transactions, agreements, contracts or anything that needs to be independently recorded and verified as having happened) has a number of useful features:
it is very transparent – as it is in the 'cloud', everyone in the network can have access to an up to date version of the ledger;
it is hard to doctor the information – making it less susceptible to fraud;
the ledger does not need to reveal underlying transaction data – so it is appealing from a data and information security perspective.

When jumping on this trend, as developer, to insource or to form a consortium, there will be slightly dull but important housekeeping issues to take care of – and they are easier dealt with up front than when haunting you at a later date. We'll discuss a just few of these." 'via Blog this'