| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 財務金融學研究所 === 106 === As we enter the 21th century, technology has evolved very rapidly. In the financial industry, there are waves of revolutions: from Bank 3.0, Big Data, Fintech, to the latest hot issue, Blockchain. This thesis gives a comprehensive analysis of the application of blockchain in the financial industry.
We first introduce the fundamentals of Bitcoin to better understand the core characteristics of blockchain. Bitcoin is an innovative design of combining multiple cryptographic tools to create a cryptocurrency system. Decentralization is the most distinguished feature of Bitcoin. However, decentralization also comes with the price of low speed and high energy consumption.
When blockchain is used in the financial industry, some of its characteristics need to be changed. Private blockchain and faster consensus algorithm are adopted. It is also called Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). Then we analyzed three different blockchain application cases of the financial industry (capital market, credit card, and trade finance). Throughput capacity is still the biggest obstacle, suggesting that using blockchain gives lower efficiency than the traditional mode. The efficiency improvement effect of blockchain actually comes from the change of process and automation, which can be independently implemented outside blockchain. Also, considering privacy and business secret issues, it is very hard to fully decentralize in financial blockchain. In most cases, it is still necessary to have an administrative node to manage the blockchain. In trade finance, the business model is closer to blockchain’s distributed nature, so we infer that it is suitable to use blockchain.
We reach the conclusion that blockchain could be a choice for improving financial services, but not necessarily the best solution for every financial transaction.
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