There is no innovation here because JPMorgan controls access to the network thus they centrally control the network. No problems are solved here that couldn't be solved without a blockchain.
> The Quorum blockchain has been tested with other major companies including Goldman Sachs and the National Bank of Canada
It is sort of decentralized. but the access is not open to everyone. Most banks aren't comfortable with putting all their eggs in the basket that could end up under someone else's control. Decentralized doesn't really make the bank feel at ease when they back up their coin by trillions of their own money. They'll want some guaranteed form of control.
The purpose is actually to bypass SWIFT and their network with a network that is completely under the bank's control.
Public and decentralized are not necessarily the same thing. Even if just two other banks join in, under an equal footing of ownership of the proof of work, its no longer centralized. I think assuming "all blockchain tech must be used only for situations with anonymous participants" is unimaginative gatekeeping. There is plenty of room to reimagine business process workflows between consenting participants, that doesnt at all hinder the public coin marketplace, or infringe or harm principled stands trying to change the world. These arent coins a single human bank customer would ever hold or use, these are for institutional settlement.
A good example could be a construction project where the general and all the subs collaborate on a database, but no one company owns it.
The smart part of JP Morgan's plan here is scalability. It might be centralized now, but it can be trivially extended into becoming decentralized at the flick of a switch, without a redesign.
That's nice to state, but it simply isn't true. JPMorgan controls access to the network, but once you're in the network, you're now on equal footing with them. If you want to, you and the other participants can fork away from JPMorgan and do your own thing. JPMorgan controls the network only in the sense that they initially extend invitations.
So you can prove to me that my account balance at JPMC is actually $100 when I do a wire or do you take JPMC’s word for it when you see the wire details?
Whether or not the validation will be public could mean you still have to trust JPMC but now you essentially get an API to validate my account balance which you didn’t have before
My point is that the advantages you described (an API) don't justify the complexity of blockchain technology since APIs can be implemented without them.
That’s a purely technical perspective on the situation. One could make the same argument about gRPC versus SOAP versus XML.
What would have been a more constructive response was:
This looks like JPMC is trying to profit off hype by building a new accounting and settlement system on blockchain. Since they control all aspects of their network and ultimately are the only one redeeming tokens for dollars, they could have used something simpler. However, I bet they did it this way because they think forking ethereum is cheaper than building a new system from scratch and also they might get a bump in stock price from the hype. If they built and announced the same system using bespoke tech (that likely solves the problem more effectively), no one would have probably cared.
I think maybe it wasn’t clear that I was responding to your comment about no innovation was made versus that blockchain was required. The innovation is that JPMC actually has an internal accounting and settlement system they can trust, not what database it uses or what language it was written in. Previously they relied on ACH and Wires which they didn’t control.
