“We’ve had the Sumaritans with clay tablets, papyri, tally sticks of wood, ledger books, and then we moved onto databases. Distributed ledgers are just multi-organisational databases with a super audit trail. That’s what makes them a ledger.”

Thus said Professor Michael Mainelli to Paul Tanasyuk. A part of the latter’s “Talk” series with “blockchain experts”, this is a warm and passionate exploration of mutual distributed ledgers and their underlying technology, as well as their realistic potential applications and the restrictions they naturally face. Makes for interesting and, dare I say, fun viewing.

And talking of talking about MDLs, the latest Long Finance Conference titled “The Dark Side of the Chain? Governing and Auditing Mutual Distributed Ledger (aka blockchain) Systems” was a great success. In the grand surroundings of the Chartered Insurance Institute’s Great Hall, 100 delegates, speakers, and panellists came together for a lively discussion on the regulatory issues surrounding the technology du jour. If you did not manage to attend, you can check out our keynote speakers’ presentations here.

In other (non-MDL) news, Long Finance’s latest report “ Security And Sustainability In Defined Benefit Pension Schemes: A Response To The Department Of Work And Pensions Consultation", by Iain Clacher, Con Keating, and Andrew Slater, engages with a subject that should concern all of us. You can read a summary of the report’s principal recommendations here.