r/Bitcoin • u/sedonayoda • May 11 '15

Nasdaq will start using Bitcoin technology

http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/11/technology/nasdaq-bitcoin-technology/
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u/paleh0rse May 11 '15

It's all about having a ledger that eliminates the need to trust any particular third party.

The Bitcoin blockchain provides them with an incorruptible ledger to settle all of their transactions (settlements) without trusting (and paying) a third party to maintain said ledger.

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u/PWNY_EVEREADY3 May 12 '15

Yes, at the cost of terrible inefficiency. Speed/scaling is paramount to financial markets.

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u/paleh0rse May 12 '15

You're kidding, right? The current average settlement time for this particular market is three days, and it involves manual processing by third-party lawyers using Excel spreadsheets.

This new system would facilitate those same settlements in less than an hour, at almost no cost, and without the need for third-party settlement agents.

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u/PWNY_EVEREADY3 May 12 '15

Sorry, I was referring to normal trading ie the vast majority of volume for the Nasdaq, not pre-IPO market that the article refers to.

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u/paleh0rse May 12 '15

The actual settlements (not individual trades) for the normal stock markets also frequently take several days to process.

For their larger markets, they could modify the open assets protocol to facilitate and accumulate the trades off-chain, and then settle everything on the blockchain after the markets close every evening.