[HN Gopher] ASX drops plan to replace CHESS with blockchain, wri...
___________________________________________________________________
ASX drops plan to replace CHESS with blockchain, writes off AUD
$250M
Author : raasdnil
Score : 208 points
Date : 2022-11-17 09:16 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (insideadviser.com.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (insideadviser.com.au)
| sethd wrote:
| > The report estimated the application software for the new
| system is still only 63 per cent complete, with an "uncertain"
| timeline to completion
|
| Does anyone actually believe the level of precision coming from
| this report? I bet good money that remaining "37%" would take way
| longer to complete than that supposed "63%" did.
|
| Oh, Accenture created the report, so it must be accurate, never
| mind. /s
| mrjin wrote:
| I think the number might be plausible, but you know, even if
| you get 80% done, it's probably only 20% of the effort. The
| remaining 20% will require 80% of the effort, which is 4 times
| of the committed.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| That's typical in these kinds of reports. I wouldn't
| necessarily read that as Accenture believing they have 2 s.f.
| precision. If you put something like 60+-20% in a report like
| this, to the audience it might look like you've done a bad job
| and have no idea what the real number is.
| delusional wrote:
| It may be even more banal than that. If you start putting
| simple boxed uncertainties on numbers the reader might start
| adding their own uncertainties to your uncertainties when
| they communicate it further.
|
| I've found that when communicating with "leadership" it's
| best to not present anything difficult that requires them to
| make judgement, because they'll use that as an excuse to do
| what they wanted to do anyway (60+-20% that's basically 80%
| and there's always some uncertainties with these things, so
| that's basically 90% so it's basically done, just ship it).
|
| Providing uncertainty is just asking someone else up the
| chain to pick the number. It's better to just pick it
| yourself to shape the conclusion you're going to make. The
| people making these decisions aren't scientists. They don't
| have any allegiance to your methodology or analysis. They
| just care about the conclusion.
| raasdnil wrote:
| ASX is the Australian Stock Exchange.
| blowski wrote:
| And Chess is the "clearing and settlement system".
| lynx23 wrote:
| Where does the "H" in CHESS come from, then?
| haunter wrote:
| Clearing House Electronic Sub-register System
|
| https://www2.asx.com.au/about/regulation/clearing-and-
| settle...
| rsynnott wrote:
| This definitely feels like a backronym.
| [deleted]
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Clearing House Electronic Subregister System
|
| https://www.commsec.com.au/support/help-centre/About-the-
| sha...
| Safeerali wrote:
| Ya great
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| What's interesting is that the previous CEO of ASX left recently
| and said that the job is done, the tech is working and clients
| are testing - they just need to swap over in production - but he
| prefers the new CEO to be in drivers seat for that migration.
| shearichard wrote:
| Even if their comments were sincere they wouldn't be the first
| suit to have a limited understanding of the Pareto principle.
|
| Also if there's a new CEO they are certainly going to want to
| clear out the cupboards, hence the call to Accenture (doubtless
| with some significant guidance on what the client expected in
| the report).
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I loled at the % done figure in the article. You eventually
| realize there are 2 dones: 0 and 100% :-)
|
| This is why continual delivery is preferable over a big bang.
| What could you blockchainify for a million. Then the lesson
| that blockchain is crap is cheaper.
| urthor wrote:
| You can't really do Orthodox ScrumMaster 2 week,
| incremental continual delivery for something like this.
|
| Where are your small incremental milestones? How do you
| deliver working software every two weeks?
|
| This was just a big, hard, database project. It's not a
| "textbook" easy to deliver project.
|
| You just need smart cookie project managers and Chief
| Engineers to manage whether you do 1 week milestones or 1
| month milestones.
| siva7 wrote:
| Are you kidding? If you can't deliver small incremental
| milestones in your project, then the project is doomed to
| fail with such project management before start.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I think 6 weeks is better than 2 maybe, but it should be
| possible.
|
| If what you are doing is very novel those deliveries may
| be proof or disproof of concepts. The customer being
| yourself in a way.
|
| In 6 weeks it should be possible to deliver "does
| blockchain make sense".
|
| The question is if the answer is NO does the org have the
| guts to can it. Someones paycheck might depend on keeping
| it going.
| shearichard wrote:
| If you're interested in some lower level details this article
| gets into what was seen as the limitations of the technology
| https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/17/asx_blockchain_readin... .
|
| It's not clear to me whether the $A250M was the direct costs to
| the Exchange (ie invoices + ASX staff time) or the value which
| the Exchange was carrying the software on their books at ?
| neffo wrote:
| > It's not clear to me whether the $A250M was the direct costs
| to the Exchange (ie invoices + ASX staff time) or the value
| which the Exchange was carrying the software on their books at
| ?
|
| They are the same thing. The wage, service and material costs
| through development are capitalised as an intangible asset.
| (Essentially the attributable development costs become the
| value of the asset.) This intangible asset just got written
| down to zero as it was accessed as having zero future economic
| return.
| shearichard wrote:
| I'm not an accountant ... but is this always true ? Isn't the
| software that underlies a Stock Exchange looked upon in the
| same way that, say, the brand value is ? If the development
| that has now been abandoned had turned out to be raging
| success wouldn't this have increased the value of the ASX ?
| And, in that case, wouldn't that software be treated as
| something which partially constituted the value of the ASX in
| the same way that patents held by ASX would have a value ?
|
| As I say I'm not an accountant ;-)
| langsoul-com wrote:
| I wonder why Australia even bothered. They have instant bank
| transfers, so it's not like the tech to do shit instantly, on
| scale doesn't exist.
| easytiger wrote:
| Blockchain coolaid and little more. Bought by non tech people who
| have no understanding of the technology whatsoever
| sva_ wrote:
| > The report estimated the application software for the new
| system is still only 63 per cent complete
|
| I wonder how they came up with this oddly specific number.
| shitcoder wrote:
| This is Accenture's report into the project as commissioned by
| the ASX. I encourage people to read it as it goes into the
| technical and management details as to why it failed:
| https://www2.asx.com.au/content/dam/asx/markets/clearing-and...
| mjburgess wrote:
| Where does it go into the management details?
|
| I've skim read through it, and it reads vastly too weak.
|
| They used a blockchain haskell implementation on a fringe
| blockchain technology, and wrote nearly all their business
| logic in it.
|
| If I were them, I'd immediately sue whoever built it. This
| level of gross incompetence reads to me like they were scammed,
| used as patsies to integrate blockchain into a client.
| threeseed wrote:
| > They used a blockchain haskell implementation
|
| CHESS Replacement Application code consists of Daml, Scala,
| and Haskell like Daml with ~87% of the code in Daml/Haskell
| like Daml and 17% in Scala.
|
| So not actually Haskell.
| carterschonwald wrote:
| Yeah. I'm pretty familiar with the history of their tech,
| and the problems with DAML and how they architected
| everything predate the surface syntax being Haskell.
|
| Source: I was the evaluator of DAML for Jpmorgan.
|
| The way daml is setup makes it more of a weird sibling of
| GRPC for stateful resource protocols. But where you have to
| write your own db and interpreter tooling to ingest the
| commands if you want all the usual nice things you'd expect
| from a database
| scrumper wrote:
| And a very patient and curious evaluator you were too (I
| was one of your counterparts at DA).
|
| > The way daml is setup makes it more of a weird sibling
| of GRPC for stateful resource protocols.
|
| Yes, well said. I think that's quite fair. It's wrong to
| look at it through the lens of Haskell (or any other FP
| language), it's really a declarative language for
| describing process flow and actor rights and obligations.
| Not something you could write a complete program in. A
| better way to think of it is as a big DSL for controlling
| state machines; you still need all the machinery around
| the outside to advance execution, handle IO, trigger
| events and transitions etc.
|
| It's syntactically similar to Haskell because the people
| who created it were Haskell heads out of ETH Zurich.
| That's the only connection.
| carterschonwald wrote:
| The intial surface language for the dsl was actually not
| Haskell! But I think eventually shifted to using ghc as a
| frontend library?
|
| I'm not sure if I was the most patient of evaluators ;).
| If I was despite that one of the more patient evaluators,
| wow!
|
| I kinda view everything in this space from the lens of
| tools I want to build for myself. Namely a decent
| transactional db system where the modelling language for
| datatypes and workflows is a linear logical concurrent
| functional language with some soundness guarantees. I did
| build a preliminary version of the core of that at
| jpmorgan, though for various reasons it never saw the
| light of day
| scrumper wrote:
| > But I think eventually shifted to using ghc as a
| frontend library?
|
| That's right. It happened fairly quickly, part of the
| efforts to formally verify the language. I think when you
| were poking at it was around the time it was changing
| underneath. But, that was years ago!
|
| > Namely a decent transactional db system where the
| modelling language for datatypes and workflows is a
| linear logical concurrent functional language with some
| soundness guarantees.
|
| I mean that's largely what Daml was trying to do. But of
| course it lacked the transactional DB system once we
| tossed out our in-house DLT. The approved answer back
| then was, deploy it over someone else's blockchain/DLT.
| Well, we all know about those. So before I moved on I
| spun up a successful skunkworks effort to integrated it
| into some relational databases; you'd be surprised what
| _that_ implementation ended up at the heart of.
|
| Well, patient is maybe not the right word :) You weren't
| ever a dick though and that put you in a small club. You
| can draw your own conclusions about the space I'm talking
| about (Haskellers, JPMorgan, enterprise DLT...)
|
| (I'll ping you separately as I have you at a
| disadvantage. For various reasons I won't put my name in
| this thread.)
| carterschonwald wrote:
| I assume you remember or heard of the crayons incident
| then ;)
| mjburgess wrote:
| Read "implementation" differently.
|
| I was using it in the sense that Daml is "a haskell", in
| the way that Ocaml is an ML, etc.
| blitzar wrote:
| It is paid for and reads like it was paid for by ASX -
| damning enough to say the solution is woeful, but knows that
| the person paying their consulancy fee green lit the vision
| to jam a square peg into a round hole.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Yes, that's exactly how it reads.
|
| It bends over backwards to say that somehow this approach
| meets some non-functional reqs. But it cannot plausibly
| meet any such requirements well. Even praising the
| "quality" of the haskell code whose job it is to provide a
| casio-watch level of compute power over an immutable
| distributed ledger. For $250m!
|
| It would be fascinating if, eg., the Australian gov forced
| Accenture to release their internal docs. I imagine there
| are several versions of me with with much much more
| strongly-worded things to say.
|
| This feels like it would go well in a netflix documentary
| retrospective on the "blockchain con" and how it duped
| gen-z and ceos.
| blitzar wrote:
| The bit I never understand, and these projects crop up
| all the time - for 250mil ... seed a company that you
| 100% own to build the solution.
|
| Or if you have to pay 100mil for the drop in already
| complete solution (which sounds insanely expensive).
| mrjin wrote:
| If you interpret it from a different angle, it would be
| much clearer.
|
| 1. Those made the decisions are smart, really really
| smart people. If they were dumb, there is no way they can
| get to where they are now. So if the decisions look
| questionable, they probably are indeed questionable. But
| that does not mean they made a mistake. Smart people
| don't do obvious stupid moves, if they do, there must be
| some reasons we don't know.
|
| 2. If the budget is not used, at best it lapses or worse
| will be used by someone else. So do whatever they can if
| they have nothing better to do with it.
|
| 3. If you do something for someone-else with someone-
| else's money, neither the price nor the quality would be
| much of your concern.
|
| 4. After handling meat, you know, there is oil on your
| hands.
|
| Put all that together...
| mjburgess wrote:
| When you outsource dev, you also outsource
| responsibility.
|
| Much of what board members do is play games to keep
| themselves in power.
| mrjin wrote:
| It was never about outsourcing.
| blitzar wrote:
| Major IT projects are a graveyard for executives, anyone
| who could reasonably succeed knows they are destined to
| fail, and they fail so often that big co's now have so
| much legacy chewing-gum holding together their systems
| that implementing any system is destined to fail.
|
| The most likely to work solution - rip out everything in
| the company and start from scratch. Short of that you are
| looking at - $50mil to modernise with a drop in (fully
| functioning) component in a 2 week install + 5 years and
| $100mil to write translation layers to all the other
| systems which will still fail on edge cases.
|
| Every now and then the executive that believes in
| sunshine, rainbows and unicorns comes along, slaps down a
| stupid budget and tries, with good intentions I might
| add. They however, are predisposed to buy into the people
| and vendor that sell magic beans. And they cycle
| continues...
| [deleted]
| chris_wot wrote:
| lol "Greater consideration is required regarding the purpose of
| the consensus layer given ASX's position as the central market
| operator for the CHESS use case."
|
| And
|
| " From a participant standpoint in the current design and
| architecture (not withstanding future use cases), there is
| little value to processing all the business logic on-ledger as
| ASX maintain data integrity as the market operator and
| participants receive a point-in-time view via API contracts."
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Nobody wanted to ask questions because engineers love
| building sexy things and consultants love billing sexy
| things.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Did Accenture tell them to build on blockchain in the first
| place?
| thedataangel wrote:
| I don't _think_ Accenture were the original or primary
| contractor. I'm Australian and interviewed with Digital Asset
| for that project - as far as I'm aware, DA were the main
| company responsible, although from what I've heard from
| people working on it, a _lot_ of the failure stems from
| mismanagement on the ASX side.
| mrjin wrote:
| Do you really think they care?
| blitzar wrote:
| It reads like accenture might have reccomended the accenture
| blockchain a few years ago.
| AttakBanana wrote:
| > Accenture highlighted governance flaws on both the ASX and
| delivery partner sides, including "inefficiencies in the delivery
| lifecycle through to testing, with siloed execution and reporting
| resulting in misaligned views of status on delivery progress,
| risks and issues."
|
| Sounds like the problem was mismanagement. Let's not blame crypto
| for everything.
|
| I'm not saying blockchain was the answer to their problems, but
| it could have been a sub $10M mistake if not for the terrible
| management.
| shitcoder wrote:
| I'm glad I found this on the thread at least.
|
| Here's the Accenture report in full published by ASX:
| https://www2.asx.com.au/content/dam/asx/markets/clearing-and...
|
| They failed to architect the project properly by trying to run
| everything on the blockchain smart contracts instead of
| leveraging something off chain. Similarly there was
| mismanagement from DA (the developers) and ASX with no clear
| goal of what the end product looked like or how progress was
| being made.
|
| Accenture even call out that a blockchain solution might not
| have been the best one considering the ASX centrally settles
| trades anyway.
|
| The pdf is a good read into the technical and management
| failings of the project
| urthor wrote:
| The issue is, this was one of the only major Blockchain
| projects in the world that wasn't... suspect.
|
| Much harder to convince anyone to do Blockchain work now. It's
| a blow to Blockchain's reputation.
| OhNoNotAgain_99 wrote:
| habibur wrote:
| So we are basically back to SQL servers for data storage.
|
| All other hypes are dead. 20 years.
| urthor wrote:
| Monolithic Mainframes are definitely the hip and trendy thing.
|
| You can run a ridiculously large business off a monolithic
| RDBMS.
| bryanph_ wrote:
| SQL servers with JSON support that is ;D
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| SQL, JSON ... as if the pragmatic standards that let people
| get shit done eventually and quietly eat the world.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| What drives me nuts is that, as far as I can tell, all the
| players get to keep their share of that $250 million. There's no
| talk of sanctions, nobody seems to be losing their job, the board
| is still pulling down their fees.
|
| So many large Australian institutions have been captured by
| consultants, snake oil peddelers and grifters, all with their
| hands in the jar. It's embarrassing.
| russelg wrote:
| That's exactly what the last federal government wanted, after
| all that's how they operated as well.
| urthor wrote:
| Technology as a cost centre mentality.
|
| Time and time again, Australian non-tech companies cut
| technology jobs to cost cut.
|
| Anyone competent looking to build a long term career working in
| the corporate sector either moves to sales/marketing. Or, these
| days, moves to Atlassian/Canva.
|
| Over a rolling 20 year period, the process self selects for the
| least able.
|
| The IQ at the "Head of Engineering" level in Australian non-
| tech is minuscule. Selection bias.
|
| Most of them don't have CTOs, they have CIOs who report to an
| accountant in the C-suite.
| esja wrote:
| Bingo. Adverse selection in action... they've created a
| "market for lemons".
|
| All the offshoring and outsourcing (and cultural disdain for
| technical people) means they can no longer tell the
| difference between charlatans and good tech leaders. But the
| good people know how to avoid them.
| neffo wrote:
| It's hard to give non-Australian investors a sense of how bizarre
| this was. The ASX still provides CHESS holding statements
| (updates when you transact shares, when codes change or you are
| otherwise issued new shares)... by post. On paper. There is no
| other option.
|
| Before they fixed that they wanted to move CHESS to a blockchain.
| Wild.
| nailer wrote:
| As someone that spent a decade in the Australian tech industry,
| and then a decade outside, I can say that Australia is famously
| a tech backwater.
|
| London might be seen as conservative/cautious compared to SV or
| Austin or Lisbon, but it's far ahead of Australia where bloated
| big bang projects are well supported, and lean projects by
| actual tech companies are ignored.
| viraptor wrote:
| UK may not be amazing but they do a lot correctly. Lots of
| systems integrated / running under the same umbrella. In-
| house infra with in-house ops. You can even browse through an
| the puppet and deployment scripts on public github.
| bogantech wrote:
| The problem with Aus is that all the talent leaves and you're
| left with uneducated bogans like me
| urthor wrote:
| It's even crazier talking to the people involved.
|
| The project got the underlying Blockchain tech from VMware...
| AND had a requirement for a backup "traditional" RDBMS system.
|
| So, complete feature duplication of the core, mission critical
| application.
|
| Scope creep was crazy. Someone who doesn't understand the
| technology went "blockchain yeah sure mate let's go."
|
| Good project managers are so important.
| manquer wrote:
| Good PMs would be replaced when they say a firm no in such
| top down projects
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Yeah that my thougt as well. That type of things fall from
| the sky on PM and they have to deal with the new direction.
|
| Maybe product director / VP or whatever
| rchaud wrote:
| > So, complete feature duplication of the core, mission
| critical application.
|
| A requirement likely put in place by someone who realized
| that even if executed properly, a blockchain solution would
| do no better than what the "legacy" RDBMS already could.
| threeseed wrote:
| > Good project managers are so important.
|
| That's more an issue with _Product_ Management.
| lethal-radio wrote:
| It could also be an issue for _Program_ Management or even
| _Engineering_ Management. All of those roles can be
| flexible from company to company, and many companies do not
| staff every effort with all of those roles.
| daemin wrote:
| I too am sick of getting those paper letters getting sent, so
| much waste when I end up shredding or throwing all of them out.
|
| Really the ASX should just focus on providing a solid modern
| platform for trading. Simplicity, security, and speed. None of
| that requires any form of blockchain which is slower, scammier,
| and more complex. It just requires writing a modern electronic
| computerised system.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Reminds me of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM).
| They have a web presence, in glorious HTTP like it's still
| the 1990s and everyone uses NetScape Navigator:
| http://www.bom.gov.au/
|
| They've been called out about the lack of HTTPS on their site
| in the media several times. In 2022, it's just shameful.
|
| Maybe there's a technical reason, you're about to say. Maybe
| they have an enormous load on their systems and they can't
| afford the overhead of TLS? Or something?
|
| Get a load of this: https://www.bom.gov.au/ works!
|
| It shows a full-page error message -- via correctly
| configured HTTPS -- that says: The Bureau
| of Meteorology website does not currently support connections
| via HTTPS. You will shortly be redirected to
| http://www.bom.gov.au.
|
| What kills me is that you if you use F12 network tools to
| have a look at their site, you'll notice that they're behind
| the Akamai CDN, which 100.000% certainly supports HTTPS and
| probably serves little else in this day and age... except for
| the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and other backwards
| organisations.
|
| Their excuse for this was that there already was an ongoing
| project by some consultancy (Accenture or Deloitte, I can't
| remember) to uplift their site. Years later that seems to
| have gone nowhere despite tens of millions of dollars spent.
|
| Australian organisations seem to love this kind of thing.
| Still clinging on to the old system for dear life while
| burning a huge pile of money that doesn't actually deliver
| any improvements and gets abandoned after years...
| harlequinn77 wrote:
| Also Australian,
|
| The only sensible reason I can think that BOM is not under
| https is that there are ancient mission critical consuming
| services somewhere that can't handle the upgrade.
|
| For example: a network of regional flood warning alarms
| that are pulling flood/rainfall data from a feed on the
| same url. They could have been built in the early 80s, and
| cant be upgraded. Ignoring them would risk lives etc etc
|
| Nevertheless there would be other ways to solve that.
| can16358p wrote:
| Adding HTTPS support doesn't necessarily mean removing
| HTTP.
|
| Even if there was an ancient service that can't handle
| HTTP, keeping HTTP and adding HTTPS support will do just
| fine.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Good example, but even so I can think of many way a well
| directed intern could solve that without touching the
| code of that things.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| "Do not redirect from HTTP to HTTPS if source is IP is in
| list if legacy devices."
|
| There. I've solved it.
|
| Similarly, a filter based on User Agent would likely also
| work.
| cdogl wrote:
| The web uses port 443 for HTTPS, so this example is
| unlikely to be an issue. Having said that, there are
| weird and wonderful corporate and government proxy
| configurations out there that do wacky things.
|
| My guess is that their entire system is so tightly
| coupled that they can't unpick this without a huge amount
| of work that requires real developers to stick with it
| and get around it.
| zsims wrote:
| You're just making up things trying to find a reason.
| HTTP was only invented in 1989, so these imaginary early
| 80s clients likely don't exist
| bogantech wrote:
| Sure but why do I care if my weather reports are covered by
| HTTPS? What risk is that going to mitigate?
| larsnystrom wrote:
| Tell that to Eisenhower as he's postponing D-day due to
| bad weather.
| redox99 wrote:
| Malicious JS being injected.
| jallen_dot_dev wrote:
| Weatherman in the Middle
| dools wrote:
| IT procurement in Australia is a piece of shit because, in
| the name of fairness, everything needs to go out to tender,
| but the only companies big enough to deal with a tender
| process are mostly lawyers with a couple of coders attached
| (or worse still, they just subcontract the coding). Almost
| all the money goes to people who sit in meetings discussing
| the scope, and some poor sap ends up doing the code for
| next to nothing.
|
| The government just needs to hire coders directly, that's
| what Service NSW does and it shows.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| This seems to be the correct answer based on my
| experience.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| This is a problem almost everywhere today.
|
| Lots of businesses are now tech companies, but the
| managers are from a different age so you need layers of
| other managers to do exactly the same job (when people
| talk about weak productivity growth from technology, this
| is it...it took half a decade plus after the industrial
| revolution for things to filter through, it will be a bit
| quicker this time but there are massive institutional
| roadblocks...perhaps even bigger than in the 19th century
| which was all de novo innovation).
| dopidopHN wrote:
| > Accenture and Deloitte Both ? Here you go.
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| FYI: https://weather.bom.gov.au/ supports HTTPS and is
| pretty much a "modern" drop-in for the top-level.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I think by "modern" you mean that it makes my browser
| stutter when scrolling from what appears to be layer upon
| layer of transparent divs?
|
| Also, I can't select a location manually, it forces the
| use of GPS location finding. Even if you bookmark a
| specific location and then load it in a new tab, it'll
| immediately prompt to use your location. If you refuse...
| Unable to detect location. To use your current
| location, allow permission via browser settings.
|
| It simply hides the content of the page, so you can't see
| or do anything with a URL somebody sends you if you don't
| grant location permission.
|
| I bet this page cost millions. It hides the information
| I'm looking for "below the fold". It shows a grand total
| of 276 bytes of readable text on an entire page of HTML
| that took 198 requests, 2.32 MB and 19 seconds to load.
|
| As I mentioned, I have to scroll down to see the content
| I actually wanted, which is the hourly forecast. But
| despite making you scroll, it _still_ hides half the
| content with a "show more" expanding section you have to
| manually click. The "saved" area is a tiny, _tiny_
| fraction of the multi-page screen real estate they waste
| on enormous empty space.
|
| The radar map no longer shows temperature measurements or
| anything useful, and is staggeringly slow. It stutters my
| _very_ high-end gaming laptop. This is in part because
| BoM was too incompetent to host ESRI ArcGIS themselves
| and used the cloud-hosted "tiles.arcgis.com", which is
| hosted in the United States, 230 milliseconds away from
| Australian users.
|
| Speaking of United States data centers used for
| Australian Government websites, I've noticed that it
| seems to be the policy of both state and federal
| departments to add the Google Analytics to all pages to
| ensure that Google can track our citizens during their
| interactions with their government...
| drekipus wrote:
| We're the lucky country mate.
|
| Someone came along and gave me that site. Bugger if I know
| how to change it. Once it's gone it's gone!
|
| On the one hand, https on BOM might not be a big deal / low
| priority in the grand scheme of things, but in the other
| hand it could be done in like half a day by anyone there
| who knows computers.
|
| It's probably safe to say they don't know how to computer
| big_jimmer wrote:
| As someone who worked on a Deloitte government project in
| Aus, they'd have got a better product (or anything at all
| for that matter) for way less money by just hiring a small
| dev team internally. Instead, it was outsourced, and they
| were offered a bloated Sitecore .NET monstrosity. The
| project had completely stagnated before the pandemic, and
| then that was the final nail that got it abandoned.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Not to mention these letters have an identifier which is used
| _basically as a password_ printed on them...
| dools wrote:
| It's so wildly insecure that the holder identification number
| comes out in the mail. Then if you change your address, they
| send a notification letter to the old address just letting
| you know that it was changed. This means if you move house,
| and don't get a mail redirection, whoever lives at your old
| address will receive a letter containing your holder
| identification number.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Maybe the blockchain can fix that?
| tominous wrote:
| It's ok, because they often make you give your postcode as a
| second factor.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Or last name. Which is also printed on the letter...
| levymetal wrote:
| ASX now offers electronic delivery of CHESS holding statements
| and notifications: https://www2.asx.com.au/investors/start-
| investing/electronic...
|
| However, holders can't opt themselves in; inexplicably this
| needs to be supported at the broker level. I've spoken to one
| of the large brokers who advised me they have no plans to
| support this feature.
| stevage wrote:
| Honestly I'm relieved to learn I'm not just an idiot who didn't
| know how not to get the letters.
| XorNot wrote:
| A couple of years back I remember receiving a recruitment offer
| to come build this. I both declined and laughed about it.
| gramie wrote:
| Yes, but you missed a chance to get paid a lot of money and not
| have to produce anything in the end except buzzwords and TPS
| reports. Like everyone else involved. That $250M didn't just
| evaporate, you know.
| nly wrote:
| The age of companies with terrible ideas wiping their arses with
| money like it's toilet paper has come to the end... for now.
|
| How the smeg does an MVP or PoC for something like this even cost
| $250M?
| nikanj wrote:
| $250k for the implementation, $2.25M siphoned off to the
| founders' personal accounts. It's grift all the way down
| lwansbrough wrote:
| Okay and the other $245,000,000? Lol.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| You're off by two orders of magnitude
| [deleted]
| pyb wrote:
| But the ratio is correct.
| gregjw wrote:
| Someone has made a lot money without having to deliver anything.
| Maybe they should modernise, rather than chasing buzzwords.
| excerionsforte wrote:
| Blockchain is a valid solution for fast settlement clearing
| between market participants. JPM and Visa have already proven it
| their private blockchains. NASDAQ among others are experimenting
| with their own private blockchains.
|
| JPM use of their own Onyx blockchain makes the repo market far
| more efficient:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/jpmorgan-...
|
| Visa B2B Connect for global payments:
| https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vba
|
| I get it, blockchain makes for a flashy clickbait headline. There
| are bigger problems in the project than the selection of
| blockchain as a solution.
|
| - Project was 63% with an uncertain timeline to completion. That
| alone is a red flag for any enterprise project.
|
| - The teams involved weren't communicating with each other
| resulting in confusion. aka "misaligned views".
|
| - When it comes to scalability, there is no way to rate limit
| participants, so they could screw the system given it couldn't
| process more than 100k transactions (not sure what rate since it
| is unspecified).
|
| There are multitude of issues that justify canning the project.
|
| For those unaware ASX used VMWare's DLT blockchain:
| https://www.vmware.com/welcome/asx.html. There's nothing "scammy"
| about it.
|
| I'm unsure of why people in the comments here are still confused
| between cryptocurrency and blockchain especially since they have
| distinct names. If you're gonna point out incompetence, you have
| to realize your own faults as well.
|
| Anyone who claims to have enough information to make a
| determination about blockchain tech being the cripple here
| doesn't have the information required to make it given the
| problems pointed out. There's plenty of financial industry users
| making use of it already.
|
| Lots of tunnel vision below, but that's unsurprising given the
| hate against crypto (which people below often confuse with
| blockchain). I remember the same bias against K/V dbs (NoSQL).
| People would blame the tech choice rather than the circumstances.
| It's easier for certain types to blame tech for everything then
| hail it when the project succeeds even though it was only one
| part of the equation.
| esja wrote:
| You're mixing up cause and effect. When you make terrible
| architectural choices, it leads to the other problems you
| mention. You can't build a house on quicksand, no matter how
| well your views are aligned, or how certain you think your
| timelines are.
| [deleted]
| mjburgess wrote:
| A blockchain is an immutable distributed ledger with extreme
| zero-trust computational overheads to appending entries, whose
| entire history is stored on ever instance.
|
| If you see this from an CSci (data structures & algs) pov, you
| can quickly see it's a extremely niche academic solution to a
| problem almost no one outside academia could plausibly be
| interested in.
|
| A blockchain is not a "valid solution for fast..." _anything_.
| It 's practically useless machine-trust guarantees impose
| impractical overheads for almost every basic operation.
|
| Any one claiming blockchain is a plausible solution to almost
| any technical problem is profoundly mislead.
| vesinisa wrote:
| > Blockchain is a valid solution for fast settlement clearing
| especially between market participants. JPM and Visa have
| already proven it their private blockchains.
|
| Now, have they? I was surprised to hear this because I was
| under the impression that blockchain is generally useless in an
| environment where the participants can trust each other. I
| searched for "visa jp morgan blockchain" and found these:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilymason/2022/10/11/jp-morgan...
|
| https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/41102/jpmorgan-and-visa...
|
| It seems that JP Morgan is offering a service called "Confirm"
| to validate account numbers, which Visa is using. This service
| is apparently offered on a blockchain. But nowhere does it say
| that these companies would be using a blockchain to actually
| settle real transactions. And it indeed seems a service to
| validate account numbers could just as well be offered with a
| more traditional API, like HTTP/JSON, instead of blockchain.
| [deleted]
| esja wrote:
| All the big banks have projects like these. As soon as the
| hype fades and the CIOs can stop telling their board "yes
| we're investing in blockchain", the projects will be
| cancelled.
| stephen_g wrote:
| But the problem still remains that there are almost always ways
| of doing anything that these 'private blockchains' do without a
| blockchain, that often work better...
|
| This was one of those times.
| mrjin wrote:
| Yep, the question is really why do they need blockchain in
| the first place? But I do agree that there was no better way
| to burn that $250M.
| blitzar wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Q
| u...
|
| Do that 250 * AUD/GBP rate times.
|
| edit: shit forgot to adjust for 28 years of inflation
| [deleted]
| q-big wrote:
| > Project was 63% with an uncertain timeline to completion.
| That alone is a red flag for any enterprise project.
|
| This is in my opinion rather a good sign instead of a red flag:
|
| If one is _honest_ , _nearly every_ enterprise software project
| is something like this. It is rather that nearly all managers
| are not honest, but pretend that everything is under control
| and tell you of some fictional timeline for completion.
|
| The fact that they openly admit the state and the uncertainty
| to completion is to me thus rather a good sign that the
| stakeholder are _much more_ honest than is common in such
| projects.
| BFLpL0QNek wrote:
| I wonder what this means for Digital Asset
| https://www.digitalasset.com/.
|
| The ASX brought 5.4% of digital asset and from what I heard, they
| were a core part of building the system.
| https://www.ledgerinsights.com/asx-150-million-in-blockchain...
| tdullien wrote:
| I'd presume that DA's anchor project is dead then...
| mkj wrote:
| There's no Australia on the Digital Asset homepage world map, I
| guess it's not happening any more.
| twp wrote:
| It's here: https://www.digitalasset.com/use-cases/clearing-
| settlement
| badcppdev wrote:
| ASX is still on their 'Our Partners' page ... for the moment
| stephen_g wrote:
| This project was stupid from the start, I could never see it
| working. It never made any sense using 'distributed ledger
| technology', the ASX are the central authority and they want to
| be in that position... Making anything distributed isn't actually
| useful to them or people who interact with them... They just got
| caught up in 'blockchain hype' and clearly there were some sales
| people in the right place, at the right time. Some people must
| have got away with serious cash from this boondoggle.
| gramie wrote:
| I remember sitting in on a meeting with some high-priced
| consultants who solemnly declared that "the future of the web
| is blockchain". We were discussing an update to our main
| university website. The consultants had probably each earned my
| monthly salary to drive down from Toronto for that afternoon
| meeting.
|
| The other developer and I just looked at each other and
| wondered quietly if the consultants knew they were talking
| gibberish.
| tiku wrote:
| At my bank, if I buy stock, it takes 5 days to clear/settle.
| Guess they do it by hand haha.
| dorkwood wrote:
| In my experience, CHESS takes 2-3 business days.
| blitzar wrote:
| The settlement cycle for cash equities in Australia is trade
| date plus two business days (T+2) from trade.
|
| The settlement cycle for the NYSE is two business days after
| the day the order executes, or T+2 NADAQ T+2 settlement
| cycle, etc. etc. etc.
|
| Thats how it is meant to be.
| danuker wrote:
| Blockchain is not needed where one server suffices.
| stevage wrote:
| It's not needed for any legal business.
| danuker wrote:
| Speculating against the national currency is legal business.
| And blockchain affords the existence of cryptocurrency, which
| is one way of doing it.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| But then it's not decentralized, which is bad, because
| decentralized is good, even if all the decentralized
| infrastructure is entirely owned, controlled and modified by a
| central entity unilaterally on a whim.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| A Stock Exchange is the antithesis of a distributed system.
| The reason they exist is so it's a central place where
| everyone goes to buy and sell and the prices are public and
| fair. And a clearing house is by its nature a centralised
| system (A owes B $100, B owes C $100, so A gives C $100)
|
| That's why the majority of crypto is bought and sold at
| crypto exchanges rather than on the blockchain.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The ASX is already centralised.
| blitzar wrote:
| Mirror the DB across two servers, boom decentralized
| achievement unlocked
| Zoadian wrote:
| you don't need a blockchain to decentralise anything.
| blockchain only makes sense in a case where there is no
| central authority.
| [deleted]
| vermilingua wrote:
| I can't remember what thread it was, but someone here commented
| recently that when these consultancies produce this vapourware,
| it's effectively just an expensive study to determine the
| viability of a product.
|
| In this case, $250m seems to me a reasonable sum to ensure that
| the ASX will never again get tangled up in crypto pipedreams.
| tiku wrote:
| Well blockchain is a very valid case for tracking assets like
| stocks. I guess the implementation and backwards compatibility
| is a big issue, also other banks don't want to hop on the hype
| train etc.
| esja wrote:
| Why does blockchain have a valid case for "tracking stocks"?
| We've been doing that for decades. Blockchain is a step
| backwards in many areas. So what positive benefits does it
| offer to compensate for its weaknesses?
| csomar wrote:
| Tracking stock ownership (at least in the US) is both messy
| and slow. And companies do either make mistake or do not
| honor their engagements (a la FTX, for example, by not
| actually having the stock and trying to procure it later
| when needed).
|
| A blockchain solution can make settlements faster, final
| and prevent the current issues. It also means you no longer
| need a broker to hold your stocks/assets. More
| sophisticated users can run their own "wallet".
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > do not honor their engagements (a la FTX, for example,
| by not actually having the stock and trying to procure it
| later when needed).
|
| how blockchain would block theft without blocking valid
| transfer? This requires checking real-world data so all
| blockchain stuff does not help at all.
|
| (the same transfer may be considered as valid or as a
| theft by different groups of people! See various stories
| about evacuated gold reserves of countries that were
| taken over.)
| newswasboring wrote:
| This is a bizzare comment. To show how Blockchain can
| help you use the most recent example of Blockchain
| ecosystem failing?
| codehalo wrote:
| Your comment is telling of the lack of understanding of
| blockchains 13 years in. Unreal.
|
| No wonder exchanges and consultancy firms are getting
| away with baffling the public and businesses with
| bullshit.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| A centralized cryptocurrency exchange failed because they
| gambled away their reserves and suffered a bank run.
| Nothing to do with the underlying blockchain technology,
| just good old unregulated banks screwing over everyone.
| tiku wrote:
| For one, you can't sell stocks that you don't have, like
| the Gamestop stock. Also you can own and transfer stock
| outside of exchanges, like the old paper stocks. Smart
| contracts could even be used for adding dividend and
| voting.
| m00dy wrote:
| I recently wrote a derivative protocol for a fintech in
| Dubai. So, In Defi or blockchain space, you can
| definitely sell stocks you don't have (a.k.a tokens).
| melenaboija wrote:
| > For one, you can't sell stocks that you don't have,
| like the Gamestop stock.
|
| You can create derivatives of whatever you want, it does
| not matter how the underlying is delivered or settled.
| redox99 wrote:
| Ok? But that would clearly be a derivative. Your spot
| market couldn't be faked.
| melenaboija wrote:
| Ok? I was talking about buying things "you don't have".
|
| And the settlement price could not be faked but you need
| an exchange that offers bid/ask prices and that matches
| the transactions and that could clearly be faked.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Shorting would always happen off chain. As it usually
| does in the crypto world. So people who want leveraged
| trades would always do them on exchanges, who can then do
| the exact same thing as regular exchanges.
|
| Basically you can't force everyone to do transactions on
| chain. The benefit you mentioned only exists if everyone
| is on chain.
| Gigachad wrote:
| When the most ideal case for blockchains still isn't usable,
| it really does paint a bleak picture for the future of the
| tech.
| esja wrote:
| The picture was always bleak. Cheap money and FOMO just
| stopped a lot of people seeing it.
|
| "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be
| seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover
| their senses slowly, one by one." - Charles MacKay,
| Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Even better is good old relational databases with ACID
| transactions. There is a lot you can do with that to add
| auditing, providing perhaps the main benefit of blockchain
| but in a more suitable and performant setting.
| slowmotiony wrote:
| I don't have the login to the bank's backend Oracle
| database so I can't check anything in it. With blockchain,
| anyone can see and audit the entire trading history.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Is that a requirement of a stock exchange? And if it is,
| guess what: you can create an API layer.
| redox99 wrote:
| The API can always return false data, it is a proxy for
| the actual data, not the actual data itself.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| We are both probably parroting old blockchain vs. not
| debates, but my next move is to say:
|
| Your scenario is you can't trust your stock exchange to
| correctly known who owns what stock, and you cannot trust
| their data feeds, given the heavy and necessary
| regulation of stock markets, given the very goal of them
| allowing ordinary people to invest in the largest
| companies without DD in a fungible way.
|
| In that scenario a stock exchange becomes useless
| regardless of the technology.
|
| Blockchain has other problems too. It is slow! It can't
| keep up with the source of truth. And it cannot be the
| source of truth without slowing operations down
| massively.
|
| For blockchain to be worth it you would need different
| validation nodes operated by different entities and
| consensus. This will mean the end of fast fulfilment of
| trades most likely.
|
| If your point was about simple api bugs then that is an
| interesting point. Decent operations and monitoring
| should prevent this. I would put data loss or accuracy
| bugs with stock exchange data from the source in the same
| bucket as "making the exchange useless" as it is not
| providing a fair system.
| [deleted]
| mjburgess wrote:
| Yes, that was my initial conclusion after reading the report.
|
| Some company was parasitically using them to drum-up interest
| in this useless product area.
| gjvc wrote:
| excellent news.
| __d wrote:
| Ultimately, yes. It was a stupid idea from the start.
|
| With any luck, the replacement program for the replacement
| program is a little more focused on reality, but ... I wouldn't
| hold my breath.
| badcppdev wrote:
| Where did the money go??
|
| Seems like the delivery partners were:
|
| * Digital Asset's Daml smart contract development capability
|
| * VMware's DLT (blockchain) platform
|
| Does anyone have any information about those?
| OmegaEnzoRed wrote:
| https://blog.digitalasset.com/news/afr-asx-blockchain-to-go-...
|
| https://blog.digitalasset.com/press-release/asx-digital-asse...
|
| I wonder if ASX was project managing this internally or just
| throwing poorly thought out requirements over the fence.
| taspeotis wrote:
| But how will this centralised and trusted authority maintain a
| list of who owns what now? A database??
| rado wrote:
| Accenture being useful
| zhte415 wrote:
| Of course Accenture didn't like it. It was internally managed
| with no involvement of them or a peer consultancy and thus must
| be condemned with fire, unsuccessful or not.
|
| Expect Accenture and those peers to be first in line for slices
| of future ASX pies.
| __d wrote:
| Accenture was brought in to justify the decision that was
| already made to kill the project, because the internal
| management didn't have the confidence to make and sell their
| own decisions.
|
| And this isn't the first time. A few years ago, ASX ran a
| massive project to replace the matching engines for all their
| exchanges. After burning a large pile of money, it too blew up,
| and they abandoned the whole idea.
|
| But everyone involved fails up and out with their careers and
| bonuses intact, so ... she'll be right, mate. No worries.
| [deleted]
| ohmychain wrote:
| > Accenture highlighted governance flaws on both the ASX and
| delivery partner sides, including "inefficiencies in the delivery
| lifecycle through to testing, with siloed execution and reporting
| resulting in misaligned views of status on delivery progress,
| risks and issues."
|
| They should have used blockchain - put your daily status and
| reporting on a blockchain and have it visible to everyone in a
| decentralized manner. No more silos or misaligned views. This is
| one of the many problems that blockchain solves.
| esja wrote:
| From the Australian Financial Review two weeks ago:
|
| "Unfortunately, ASX management and its board of directors have
| proven over the past seven years they do not have the technical
| skills to manage a large-scale technology project or the self-
| awareness to know that what they are doing is investing in a
| technology dead end."
|
| https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.afr.com%2Fchanticl...
| esja wrote:
| Hot off the press:
|
| "They were building a Frankenstein': how ASX's blockchain
| unravelled"
| https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.afr.com%2Fcompanie...
|
| Some people are blaming "tech nerds" for having too much
| influence over the project. Really the problem was charlatans.
| If they had hired good tech people the blockchain concept would
| have been binned years ago.
|
| Another win for the Australian tech scene. Optus, Medibank
| Private, ASX... just embarrassing.
| urthor wrote:
| ...You can have a project with exceptional engineers working
| on the domain specific language, or concurrency features in
| Haskell/Scala.
|
| Individual engineers are not necessarily talkative types.
|
| They don't necessarily have the ability to influence feature
| creep in the boardroom.
| esja wrote:
| I'm mainly referring to the technical leadership.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| You get what you pay for. Australian companies operate like
| they live on an island, which is not far from the facts.
| Except for those pesky fibre optic cables, So getting pwned
| by Russian hackers still seems otherworldly to them. Our
| markets are somewhat captive, and thus most companies can be
| kind of lazy in their approach to, well everything really.
| But IT's pretty bad. Hopefully it'll start getting better.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Tall poppy syndrome is terrible.
|
| I've seen places which will rather hire 10 developers
| getting paid $80k a year than two developers getting paid
| $400k a year. You get what you pay for. The number of
| managers who will not hire someone getting paid more than
| them is astonishing.
| mrjin wrote:
| Why that is surprising? Mediocre people in leadership for
| sure will hire people worse than themselves for obvious
| reasons:
|
| 1. Much less likely to challenge them.
|
| 2. Numbers look much better.
|
| 3. When things went south, there would be someone to
| blame.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Because I've seen it even in places where the guy doing
| the hiring was the major share holder. He flat out told
| me that no one would pay a salary like what I was asking.
| It went downhill from there and he didn't take it well
| when I told him I was making more than that now and I
| figured this was going to be a relaxing year to wind down
| from my current position, hence why I was asking for
| less.
| 3np wrote:
| More commonly,
|
| 4. They are not great at assessing and contextualizing
| skill and experience
| legostormtroopr wrote:
| $80k is not a bad salary and I struggle to think of any
| Australian dev salary that is close to $400k.
|
| Additionally, with good leadership 10 x $80k would almost
| certainly outperform 2 x $400k developers.
| mimon wrote:
| $80k was my starting salary in Sydney, as a grad, almost
| 15 years ago. It is not even close to competitive in
| today's market.
| __d wrote:
| Plenty of $400k+ salaries in fintech in Sydney ...
| ekidd wrote:
| Trading systems are complex distributed systems. They
| need extremely high reliability and low latency, on
| enormous transaction volume.
|
| There are lots of complex failure modes in a system like
| this, and minimizing them is an advanced skill. The
| learning curve for a competent generalist senior engineer
| to get good at these kinds of problems is significant.
| Designing and implementing a national securities exchange
| is a big deal.
|
| This is a place where you want either experienced
| developers who have worked on other stock exchanges, or
| at least FAANG engineers who've worked on systems with
| analogous challenges. This is not a place you want to
| skimp on salary.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| You want HFT experts because this is the definition of an
| HFT system. Those salaries even in Australia start at
| $200k for a junior developer and go upwards quite
| quickly.
|
| Of course OP thinks that $80k is a good salary for a
| developer so that ought to tell you how competent she is.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Go get those tall poppies.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| It's the ASX, in Sydney. 80K is not nearly enough for
| that work.
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