IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jacrfn/v31y2019i4p98-104.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Will Blockchain Be a Big Deal? Reasons for Caution

Author

Listed:
  • Craig Pirrong

Abstract

The initial enthusiasm for implementing blockchain in financial markets has been dampened considerably by its collision with economic realities. Though the author warns against avoiding the Panglossian trap of viewing ours as the best of all possible worlds, he reminds us that trusted institutions have evolved and emerged in a competitive environment as a means of economizing on transaction costs. Such costs arise from the nature of transactions, including crucially the information environment in which they take place. Though new technologies such as blockchain have the potential to reduce some of these costs, they often do so without fundamentally changing the underlying economic conditions that give rise to them. And as a result, institutions such as banks and exchanges that technologists scoff at may well prove surprisingly competitive and durable in the face of technological challengers. The most successful implementation of blockchain—Bitcoin—solves a very basic transactional challenge peculiar to cryptocurrency: the double spend problem. But it does so in a very expensive way, and many other transactions pose far more complex challenges. The three cautionary tales provided by the author—the first involving securities and derivatives trading and clearing, the second commodity trading, and the third proposals to “equitize” assets—all demonstrate the need to confront “Chesterton's Fence” when evaluating the potential of blockchain in any particular application. In other words, to understand the value of a new technology for a given set of functions, one must understand the economic forces that have shaped the processes and institutions that currently perform those functions. When such forces are considered, it often becomes apparent that new technologies like blockchain will not prove superior to existing practices—and may even create adverse unintended consequences that offset and perhaps even eliminate its beneficial effects.

Suggested Citation

  • Craig Pirrong, 2019. "Will Blockchain Be a Big Deal? Reasons for Caution," Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Morgan Stanley, vol. 31(4), pages 98-104, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:jacrfn:v:31:y:2019:i:4:p:98-104
    DOI: 10.1111/jacf.12379
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/jacf.12379
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/jacf.12379?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Schuster, Philipp & Theissen, Erik & Uhrig-Homburg, Marliese, 2020. "Finanzwirtschaftliche Anwendungen der Blockchain-Technologie," CFR Working Papers 20-02, University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR).
    2. Philipp Schuster & Erik Theissen & Marliese Uhrig-Homburg, 2020. "Finanzwirtschaftliche Anwendungen der Blockchain-Technologie [Applications of Blockchain Technology in Finance]," Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research, Springer, vol. 72(2), pages 125-147, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jacrfn:v:31:y:2019:i:4:p:98-104. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=1078-1196 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.