金融業應用區塊鏈之探討

Abstract

自邁入21世紀以來，科技的進步迅速，金融業也出現了一波一波變革的浪潮，從Bank 3.0、大數據、金融科技，到近期最熱門的話題—區塊鏈。本文綜合性分析了區塊鏈在金融業的應用。 首先，透過比特幣的基礎以瞭解區塊鏈的核心特徵。比特幣是結合了多種密碼學工具的創新設計，建構出一個加密貨幣系統，去中心化是比特幣最顯著的特質。然而，去中心化也伴隨著速度慢、耗能高的代價。 當區塊鏈應用到金融業時，會進行一些調整，採行私有鏈並選用較快速的共識機制，也被稱為分散式帳本技術。本文接著分析了三種不同的金融業應用區塊鏈的案例(資本市場、信用卡、貿易金融)。吞吐量(處理交易的速度)仍是最大的障礙，區塊鏈比傳統模式效率低。區塊鏈改善效率的效果其實主要來自於流程的改變及自動化，都可以獨立於區塊鏈之外進行。此外，考量隱私權及商業機密等議題後，金融業區塊鏈很難完全去中心化，大部分情況下仍需要一個行政節點來管理區塊鏈。而在貿易金融中，業務的本質較接近區塊鏈的分散性特質，因此推論較適合應用區塊鏈。 根據本文的分析，結論是區塊鏈可以作為金融業改善業務的一個選項，但未必是所有金融交易最好的解決方案。

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.