BLOCKCHAIN

Accenture, ANZ Bank, Blockchain, BNY Mellon, Calastone, Cisco, CLS, CME Group,
ConsenSys, Credits, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Deutsche
Börse Group, Digital Asset Holdings, Fujitsu Limited, Guardtime, Hitachi, IBM, Intel,
IntellectEU, J.P. Morgan, NEC, NTT DATA, R3, Red Hat, State Street, SWIFT, Symbiont,
VMware, and Wells Fargo.
The involvement by central banks is also growing. By request from the Bank of
England, researchers at University College London have created the cryptocurrency
RSCoin, with a monetary policy designed to be centralized and controlled by the central
bank. 81 Moreover, the Dutch central bank stated in their annual report that they
will develop a working prototype called DNBcoin based on blockchain technology. 82
The central bank of Barbados have published a paper in which they explore the possible
future need for the central bank to hold an amount of bitcoin as part of its portfolio
of foreign reserves to protect against the destabilization of its currency. 83 Reports
about digital currencies and blockchain have also been published by the ECB 2012 84
and 2015 85 , Fed 2014 86 , BIS 2015 87 , UK HM Treasury 2015 88 , and the IMF 2016. 89 Some
of their conclusions are mentioned in later parts of this report regarding regulatory
concerns and possible socioeconomic impacts.
Some in the Bitcoin community have expressed skepticism regarding the ability
of banks and financial institutions to implement secure private permissioned blockchains,
instead of building on an open, public, borderless, decentralized, and permissionless
blockchain such as Bitcoin that has been working and hardened on the
open Internet for seven years. Public blockchains living on the open Internet tend
to grow stronger and more resilient over time, as the network protocol software is
frequently updated to counter and withstand every attack vector it is constantly
bombarded with. It is like training an antifragile immune system in the most hostile
environment. Private blockchains would not face this same pressure to evolve and
grow resilient in response to constant attacks since they are kept in a protected
network environment. One of the strongest points of contention is also how data
security can be maintained in a blockchain without using proof-of-work as the consensus
algorithm. 90
81. Danezis, G., & Meiklejohn, S. (2015). Centrally banked cryptocurrencies. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.06895v2.
pdf
82. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dutch-central-bank-experiment-blockchain-based-simon-lelieveldt
83. http://www.centralbank.org.bb/news/article/8827/should-cryptocurrencies-be-included-in-the-portfolioof-international-reserves
84. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf
85. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemesen.pdf
86. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2544331
87. http://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d137.htm
88. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/414040/digital_
currencies_response_to_call_for_information_final_changes.pdf
89. https://www.bitcoinnews.ch/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/sdn1603.pdf
90. http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/private-blockchains/
ENTREPRENÖRSKAPSFORUM 47