The Fed’s plan to speed up payments despite banks’ resistance
venturebeat.comWhat possible advantage does a “blockchain” have for a payments system controlled by a single entity?
The Federal Reserve doesn’t need to dupe dumb investors with buzzwords.
The Federal Reserve isn't a single entity. Its composed of 12 different member Federal Reserve Banks. And The banks that are part of the Federal Reserve system own stock in the member Feds and have significant representation on it. Also blockchains are great if you care about transparency, immutability, and accessibility.
A public Merkle tree like the certificate transparency logs can serve the same purpose a million times more efficiently than a PoW blockchain.
True. But its not programmable, in the way that Ethereum is for example. And that would be a nice feature to have in a payments system. PoW would never make sense for the Fed anyway - more likely PoS with some combination of Member Feds and participating FIs doing the staking and validating would make more sense.