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Bitcoin Australia Software

Australian Stock Exchange Says Software Overhaul Will No Longer Involve Blockchain (reuters.com) 31

Posted by BeauHD from the reversing-course dept.
Australia's stock market operator, ASX Ltd, has announced that it will no longer pursue the rebuilding of its software platform using blockchain technology. The decision comes after an external review found that the project would require significant rework, and ASX stated that it will explore more conventional technology options to achieve its business goals. Reuters reports: ASX frustrated market participants in November by "pausing" a rebuild of its all-in-one trading, settlement and clearing software based on the decentralized computing concept, after an external review found it had to be largely reworked after seven years of development. The company has since said it is considering options for another attempt at the rebuild of the 30-year-old software, but at a meeting with participants this week it said it would not involve blockchain or related "distributed ledger technology" (DLT).

Asked if the next attempt would "go down the more conventional route, that is without the focus on DLT (or) blockchain," exchange project director Tim Whiteley told the meeting that "while we continue to explore all the options, certainly we will need to use a more conventional technology than in the original solution in order to achieve the business outcomes." The statement signals the end of what was to be one of the world's most prominent use cases of the concept that promises to accelerate online transactions by processing them securely in multiple locations.

Until now, ASX has said it may resurrect the project using blockchain-based technology developed by New York-based contractor Digital Asset. It has said it will announce a new strategy for the project by year-end. Whiteley told the meeting ASX was on track to decide a new strategy by year-end. It sent a request for information to potential software vendors and "issued an RFP to a number of vendors who responded more positively ... for more detailed feedback," he said, using the acronym for a request for proposal. Market participants had told ASX they did not want a risky, single-date changeover to new software, and "that feedback has been taken into the implementation planning," Whiteley said.
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Australian Stock Exchange Says Software Overhaul Will No Longer Involve Blockchain More

Australian Stock Exchange Says Software Overhaul Will No Longer Involve Blockchain

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  • But But (Score:3)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Friday May 19, 2023 @10:04PM (#63536213)
    Blockchain with AI, Blockchain with AI

  • Blockchain Projects? (Score:3)

    by NoWayNoShapeNoForm ( 7060585 ) on Friday May 19, 2023 @10:15PM (#63536217)

    Are they still a "thing" or are they now a "was a thing" ?

    It seems like Internet Time affects everything at some point in the technology lifecycle.

    • Re:Blockchain Projects? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by thogard ( 43403 ) on Friday May 19, 2023 @11:25PM (#63536303) Homepage

      It "was" a thing that had use. Back in 1999 or so we built a payment system for use at remote music festivals. These didn't have any mobile phone coverage and even data comms from one end of the venue to the other was expensive and unreliable. The ticket system deducted value from your card and then stuck on a bunch of other transactions on the card with a digital signature. If anyone took a card from the remote ends of the venue to the main area, the main computer updated all the transactions and put a new record on the card with the current totals. The result is the central computer and the remote ends had a very good idea of anyone was playing games with the balances. The next year the comms issue was worked out and all transactions went back to the main database.

  • In other words (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, 2023 @10:20PM (#63536225)
    The overpaid imbocile that was originally championing Blockchain development has left the company and the common sense of the rest of the development teams have finally kicked back in.

    • Nah (Score:2)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 )

      It was simply a case of an urgent email from the Buzzword Dept letting project managers know that Blockchain is as happening as Justin Beiber in 2023 and that AI is now The Shit and to concentrate on putting that in everything instead.

  • finally. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Friday May 19, 2023 @10:28PM (#63536237)
    surprised it took them this long to come to their senses, blockchain offered no real advantages but plenty of problems. It was a solution for a problem that didn't exist.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by hbackert ( 45117 )
      Blockchains offer real advantages, but only when you do not want to have or cannot have a central location which has is used as "source of truth". In this case, the ASX better be the source of truth which makes the whole blockchain overhead pointless. Took them long enough to see.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        in the context blockchain absolutely provided no advantages. Blockchain may have some advantages in niche processing that is decentralised, but that is not what this moronic projects were trying to implement. Even in the decentralised scenario their are faster and more efficient methods.

      • The thing is though, other than daft cryptocoins when ever is that true?

        I keep seeing this idea of "decentralized source of truth" come up in my job and all I can think of is

        1) We have a source of truth, its called a fucking database.
        2) Replication. viola, decentralized.

        • 1) We have a source of truth, its called a fucking database.
          2) Replication. viola, decentralized.

          3) Profit !!
          Now you have 2 sources of truth.
          More truth is better right? Even when the truths differ...oops...

  • ASX awarded contracts to business who knew nothing but were friends. They overpaid and tried to hang it all on the consulting group brought in at the end. Typical garbage corruption. Many people need fired, some need jail. Nothing to do with DLT being used in trades being good or bad.

  • The only reason to want a blockchain instead of a traditional stock ownership is if you don't trust the person holding your stocks. This would be shooting themselves in the foot, as people would be able to trade them whenever, based on whatever rules they want to make up. Obviously this level of non-control is bad for them, and nobody in charge would never give the OK.

  • The stock exchange won't become a block exchange. Much money was exchanged. Now it's just a case of who to blame.

  • Except for scams, money-laundering and gambling, the "Blockchain" offers nothing that established tech does not do better, after all. A stock exchange, same as a bank, simply uses revision-proof storage and establishes trust relationships via certificates.

  • The decision comes after an external review found that the project would require significant rework

    Please, anyone - jump in and correct me here.

    A significant overhaul was already underway under the banner of "with blockchain" because that's a popular buzzword but since nobody there actually understood how to do that, they just worked on a regular rewrite hoping to figure out how to bolt a "blockchain" on it toward the end. When they had literally anyone else look at it, they were forced to realize that this is not just a marketing buzzword - it would have to be integral to the design and you can't reall

  • It's about transparency, not cost (Score:3)

    by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Saturday May 20, 2023 @07:24AM (#63536937)

    Going to distributed ledgers/blockchain would essentially fumigate the swamp in the financial markets. A few immediate side effects:

    1. All short selling would be transparent within the limits of identifying users on the chain.
    2. All market makers would be forced to close short exempts because short exempts would be registered as placeholder tokens in a wallet.
    3. Brokerages and clearing houses could easily identify short exempts and naked shorts and programmatically block the transactions to eliminate their liability.
    4. High speed wash trading between two or more conspirators to control price action would be registered in public and OSINT hunters could actively track such behavior and identify the wallets.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by nickovs ( 115935 )

      While all ledger nodes would have a copy of the blockchain and they would have access to that level of transparency, blockchain is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve transparency for everyone.

      It's not necessary because you could solve all of the problems you mention with a unidirectional, real time stream from a conventional database ledger. Since the stream would be one way you wouldn't have to deal with the huge cost of achieving consensus between the ends.

      A blockchain is also not sufficient to g

      • And who would run this database system? Such a system couldn't likely guarantee that all transactions are recorded. There's already a lot of suspected fuckery going on with our current system and expecting people to voluntarily record transactions that would expose their own illegal activity is pretty unrealistic.

    • Short selling is transparent to national clearing houses already, T+1/2(+infinity) is just a legal fiction kept on life support by an industry full of scammers, not a digital reality of the clearing process.

      You can publish/withhold a log of trades regardless how you implement the system.

  • It has yet to be the case that the blockchain solves a problem that has not already been solved by other means long ago, more simply and more efficiently.

    • It did solve the Byzantine Generals Problem... unfortunately, that seems to be unworkable in the real world. Still, it did find a solution to a theoretical math problem.

      The rest was just garbage and anyone with any kind of background in computer security, databases, finance, or networking should be embarrassed if they didn't catch on to that right away, because all things blockchain fail in each of those categories at a very basic level.

      Everything since the very early days has just been people trying to '

  • Damn! I wanted to see if block chain could address the issue of naked short selling.
    • I wish I had mod points because this was my first thought. I'm normally not a big fan of blockchain at all, but I can't think of any other system that would guarantee that all transactions would be recorded and could expose things like frontrunning and naked shorting. I think that blockchain technology has a bad reputation because of its association with useless cryptocurrencies and all of the scams associated with crypto, but this is one set of problems where blockchain could actually prove useful. It's

      • Not sure why a central database wouldn't also "guarantee that all transactions would be recorded"? Also not clear on how a blockchain would help with detecting naked shorts in any way that a centralised database couldn't also, and more easily. All blockchain brings to the table that is unique is consensus-based transaction approval, right? Centralised databases can have public ledgers and blockchains can be private, so it's not a public-versus-private ledger problem, if that's what you were thinking. It's n

        • Not sure why a central database wouldn't also "guarantee that all transactions would be recorded"?

          It can, however when it comes to blockchain bro's they are blind to any solution that doesn't include blockchain.

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