Blockchain: a solution looking for a problem

While new financial technologies show considerable promise, many proposed applications are either naive or miss the mark outright

The Holy Grail? Bitcoin is highly centralised and predominantly orientated towards the Chinese market

Alexander Lipton is a Connection Science Fellow at MIT and an Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at NYU.

Fintech in general, and blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) in particular, are currently the toast of the town. Expectations of their impact on the banking industry are nothing short of miraculous; it looks like finance is going through a ‘cold fusion' phase. Potentially, fintech can have numerous applications; as of now, it is not clear which ones.

Although the current obsession