Why Companies are Experimenting With the Bitcoin Blockchain, and Why They Won't Build Their Own BlockchainThe bitcoin blockchain is the world's most cryptographically-secure ledger.
That is bigger than most realize.
If you are a business, what is the cost of licensing this technology.
Nothing!?
Imagine that from the point of view of businesses. Normally a tech like this would cost gigantic amounts of money to license. Only the largest companies could even think about using it.
And who controls it, some US company, right?
No one?
Even the NSA can't take your bitcoin? Your ledger transactions aren't conditional, can't be erased?
And how secure is the system--world-wide miners all paying for the transaction processing themselves, you pay them pennies per transaction at best? Incredible.
Now think about cost-benefit of trying to start a blockchain on your own. You lose out on the gigantic amount of processing power which is out there securing the existing blockchain--plus young blockchains are inordinately vulnerable blockchains.
Plus you'd have to actually start paying people to mine, probably people you hire to do so. Which means buying your own mining equipment and hiring and training competent people, not to mention setting up all sorts of disaster planning, hiring or building datacenters, dozens of new policies in place, and if the system should go down for any reason, you're the one on the hook.
So you've got to hire technical wizards to secure this thing, but the problem is, the best people in the world are already working on bitcoin, and they aren't going to come work for you.
Why do all that, spend gobs of money, and achieve only an inferior result? One that will also be quickly outdated.
If you build on the bitcoin blockchain, you gain the benefit of the developers thoughts and changes and diligence in keeping the system up and running and ensuring problems don't become systemic.
You'd pay major, major money to find people to do that for an alternate blockchain that didn't have a world-wide scope like bitcoin does.
If you close off your blockchain and make it private only among your affiliates, you lose a lot of flexibility and possibility as well. There's little to no point in having a non-public blockchain, you may as well build a private ledger.
It's the very public and open nature of the bitcoin blockchain that makes it what it is, that makes it a draw for the entire world.
It is the fact that no one controls bitcoin that causes many people to place trust in a protocol that otherwise would be difficult to trust.
Bitcoin is on its way to becoming as embedded in our world and life as TCP/IP / HTTP is today, and for similar reasons.
http://de.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ehoxq/why_companies_are_experimenting_with_the_bitcoin/