
Nine of the World’s Biggest Banks Form Blockchain Partnership - uptown
https://recode.net/2015/09/15/nine-of-the-worlds-biggest-banks-form-blockchain-partnership/
======
civilian
Here's the press release (pdf):
[http://static1.squarespace.com/static/55f73743e4b051cfcc0b02...](http://static1.squarespace.com/static/55f73743e4b051cfcc0b02cf/t/55f8119ce4b0550fcc16d156/1442320796627/PRESS+RELEASE+Global+banks+form+partnership+with+R3+-+FINAL.pdf)

This sounds exciting. My gut reaction was that the banks aren't going to use
it for actually transferring money, but as a way to notarize transactions that
will be acknowledged by the whole group. It does sound like a cool way to
verify everything going on among a network of players.

And there's a lot of weird hate towards bank on HN. I know they're not great,
but it's really not helping the conversation to just say things like "woooo
banks are scary!"

//edit: A key quote from the press release:

> _The group will collaborate on research, experimentation, design, and
> engineering to help advance state-of-the-art enterprise-scale shared ledger
> solutions to meet banking requirements for security, reliability,
> performance, scalability, and audit._

It's a shared ledger system! So, really no need to have it be bitcoin. It does
make sense. It'll be great to see the confused looks on lawyer's faces when
they try to lobby to change the blockchain history.

~~~
oneJob
Banks aren't scary, they're a-hole dinosaurs. Banks epitomize centralized
authority and regulation. Banks borrow money for less than they lend it
effectively guaranteeing a profit if properly and concervatively managed, and
yet they have recently and repeatedly failed. In the process they have
inflicted enormous harm to our economy and lives, but they have not shared a
proportionate share of the costs. The costs they impose hardly justify the
veritable monopolies banks are afforded by the laws and regulations which are
very effective at preventing competitors from entering the market.

Now consider where the tyical HN reader comes down on these issues. So yeah.
Not a lot of love for banks.

~~~
rtpg
>Banks borrow money for less than they lend it effectively guaranteeing a
profit if properly and concervatively managed

Sure, in a magical world where 100% of people pay back their loans. 2008
happened for a reason

~~~
lugg
I'm not sure what you're point is here. There is no magical world 2008 or not,
never do you see 100% of people paying back their loans.

Conservatively managing loans means minimising lending to people likely to
default, and leveraging enough to cover those who do. You do not need 100% of
people to pay back their loans to turn a profit, charging interest is what
makes this manageable and guarantees a profit.

~~~
3pt14159
While I agree that bankers hold too much influence in politics, this line of
thinking is obviously incorrect. First, bankers have margins and compete like
any other entity. If they are too conservative they will not get enough
borrowers to cover the cost of their staff and facilities. Furthermore, to
just earn a profit is not enough, a banker needs to earn a profit consummate
with its market capitalization. Most banks are publicly traded, after all.

------
danbruc
Banks don't require pseudonymity. If you remove pseudonymity from the list of
requirements you no longer need mining, you can just run any consensus
protocol to agree on and cryptographically link pieces of information.

~~~
icebraining
Yes, but Bitcoin is a full system already designed for this exact purpose. The
only real issue is the waste of proof-of-work, but that's proportional to the
hashing power given to it; if the chain is private, a single server per bank
would suffice.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
None of what you said makes any sense. No bitcoin isn't designed for private
ledgers, it's the exact opposite, an innovation to make global, public,
decentralised/distributed (you can argue the semantics a bit here), trustless
system without a dependency on any particular set of gate keepers, while
keeping alive some semblance of privacy/pseudonymity. This private banking
database requires none of that and is the opposite of what bitcoin was
designed for. And the gigantic waste of proof-of-work is completely
unnecessary, and forcing the use of it regardless by keeping a 'single server
per bank' is insane, it's literally a waste of money. Not only that but it
doesn't even achieve anything you want as it creates a false sense of
security, after all what stops a bank from simply having more than 1 server
and blowing all the proof of work from anyone else out of the water and
dictating the entire database? Well guess what, the exact same thing that
obviates the need for a proof of work system in the first place.

Bitcoin is the dumbest possible technology outside of the context for which it
was designed, in which it appears to be the only viable technology and works
incredibly well. Running a private blockchain with a set bunch of gate keepers
is simply ridiculous.

~~~
icebraining
I agree.

My point is: Bitcoin is a well-tested shared ledger, with plenty of eyeballs
trying to exploit and secure it.

Does it make technical sense to run Bitcoin for a private ledger? No, it does
not, you're absolutely right.

But does it make business sense to waste a few CPU cycles mining, compared to
wasting probably hundreds of thousands of dollars developing custom software
for this purpose, which will still be less tested and probably more insecure?
I'd say it does.

------
yid
Interesting. Another way to read this is that trust between banks has
deteriorated to the point where they feel that they need a blockchain -- a
decentralized shared ledger -- to verify certain transactions _with each
other_. Because otherwise a nice centralized, shared ledger is much easier to
build, analyze, maintain, and secure.

~~~
cbhl
Banks don't operate on trust -- they operate on checks and balances and
intermediaries. For example, when you spend your money using a Visa or
MasterCard, the payment processor (intermediary between your bank and the
merchant's bank) takes a cut for helping remove the need for trust from the
transaction.

~~~
throwaway1967
> Banks don't operate on trust

Can you spell LIBOR? Banks do operate on trust, which is what allowed the
LIBOR conspiracy to take place.

Unless you can list here the "checks and balances and intermediaries" that
failed during all that fake setting of LIBOR rates.

~~~
wickes
LIBOR doesn't demonstrate that banks rely on trust. None of the involved banks
or brokers trusted that anyone else was actually being honest about LIBOR
submissions or predictions.

Even if there were any system safeguarding LIBOR whatsoever, a blockchain
wouldn't have helped. The reason it was so easy to falsify your bank's LIBOR
submission was because they were essentially made up. Submitters produced the
number by talking to brokers and then making a decision. A blockchain wouldn't
have made any difference. You'd put your submission on the blockchain, and you
wouldn't be able to change it later if things didn't turn out how you liked,
but you had made up the submission anyway. Nobody would ever be able to point
to some number on the blockchain and say definitively that your reported LIBOR
figure for today should have been X but in fact it was Y and therefore you're
a crook, because the figures were never verified. They'd only be able to say
"There's no record, so you could easily have just made up the number," and
you'd say "I did make it up, that's how you do it, everyone else made theirs
up too," and that would pretty much be it. The only way to catch someone being
dishonest was to find records of employees talking about it; the Hayes case
and others like it are based on the fact that bankers incriminated themselves
by discussing the manipulation with each other.

By contrast, when banks transfer specific quantities of money, they absolutely
are not relying on a trust-based system. I owed you X, I sent you X, and I
swear to God if you come to me later and say I only sent Y and I owe you more
dosh there will be a fight. If you produce internal records kept by your
accountants that say I totally only sent Y, no bank would take your word for
it under any circumstances. Similarly, if there was a mixup and some of my
assets ended up with you by accident, my chances of convincing you that I
should get them back are nonexistent if I don't have some outside system
demonstrating that I'm not lying. In real life, financial institutions rely on
third-party businesses to be that "outside system." A blockchain would help
solve our problem without those businesses. I wouldn't need to trust you, the
transaction would be recorded on our blockchain, and if either of us thought
the other could falsify the blockchain we wouldn't have agreed to use it. If
the blockchain says I really didn't send enough money, I'll probably say
something about a technical glitch and give you the cash while I grumble about
how much I hate technology. Neither of us have to trust each other any more
than we already don't, and we don't have to involve some kind of trust or
clearing business.

------
lorddoig
Banks working together is a scary idea. This was the notion atop which the
recently disbanded Payments Council (UK) was based - an organisation that
failed to deprecate BACS/CHAPS, had to be told to implement Faster Payments,
came up with the 'innovative' pay-by-mobile-number scheme, and replaced swipe
& sign card payments with a JavaCard that knows it's own 4-digit PIN.

Feast your eyes, ladies and gents. What you are witnessing is the formation of
a cartel.

~~~
Kalium
How would you prefer technical standards be established?

~~~
lorddoig
It's not just technical though. BACS/CHAPS (payment systems that take days to
move money and cost about £30 a go) would never die while banks had control of
common technical standards. They're absurd. These standards mandate that each
network hop include a holding delay measured in tens of hours. From light
speed to days and why? Because it's a cash cow they'd be insane to mess with.

------
malandrew
I suspect that this could be an effort to do something like the Financial
Services Roundtable.

1) Form an organization

2) get dinosaur market peers to join

3) establish a standard

4) collude on how things get done

5) lobby for regulation around how things get done

6) make it impossible for new entrants to disrupt the new system with
technology and alternative business models.

7) profit.

------
maesho
Very related. For those who don't know Szabo is as close to the anonymous
founder of Bitcoin as it is possible to get.

Nick Szabo: If banks want benefits of blockchains they must go permissionless

[https://uk.news.yahoo.com/nick-szabo-banks-want-
benefits-085...](https://uk.news.yahoo.com/nick-szabo-banks-want-
benefits-085631141.html#Sgnss1N)

"So they keep trying to re-inject points of control, and thus points of
vulnerability, into blockchains, e.g. through 'permissioning'; but this
nullifies their main benefits, which come from removing points of
vulnerability."

~~~
joeyspn
It makes sense what Sa.... (cough) Szabo says in that article... If the big
guys really want to build a true "Internet of Money/Assets" two basic things
will be required:

1\. A common standard

2\. Global openness

Surely they can build their own walled garden, but I think they're missing the
point with this. With a walled garden you're just taking 1/100000 of the HUGE
pie, improving current financial processes but not coming up with new radical
innovations. A simple payment/monetisation standard embedded in objects (IoT)
would be an example of a bigger piece of pie.

IMO they should just push for an open standard and use private ledger
contracts on top of Ethereum, but I doubt they'll go this way. Most likely
they'll just fork and run with it.

~~~
woah
What's the iot reference for? How does putting Bitcoin implementations into
random pieces of plastic (like a "smart cup") figure into your analysis at
all?

~~~
joeyspn
If you've been following the crypto 2.0 space you'll know that a lot of ideas
have popped up for IoT and embedded smart contracts. For instance, washing
machines or fridges that detect that are running low on X and automatically
place an order for delivery. IBM and Samsung have been exploring this kind of
IoT applications with Ethereum's blockchain [0].

A private blockchain (like the one the banking industry _presumably_ would
deploy) can do 1 of 1000000 possible applications for the technology, but a
global and open blockchain could channel all under the same protocol
(something like TCP/IP), maximising interoperation among player in several
industries.

I'm just trying to reflect that these 9 big guys could be making a short-
termed shortsightedness mistake trying to protect their business placing a
fence. As Szabo said, it's the moment to be more open.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1XOPIqyP7A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1XOPIqyP7A)

------
phkahler
Doesn't some of the blockchains security come from having a large number of
players maintaining the chain? Isn't there a vulnerability that depends on
someone taking over a large enough percentage of the infrastructure? Wouldn't
having a handful of entities doing the majority of the transactions allow them
to commit fraud, or alter the ledger?

~~~
this_user
If only trustworthy entities are part of the network, this isn't much of a
problem. No large financial institution will launch an attack against their
own network.

~~~
aianus
> If only trustworthy entities are part of the network

Then you don't need a blockchain at all, just use a centralized ledger.

~~~
eru
Or even decentralized.

------
roymurdock
_Rutter said the initial focus would be to agree on an underlying
architecture, but it had not yet been decided whether that would be
underpinned by bitcoin’s blockchain or another one, such as one being built by
Ethereum, which offers more features than the original bitcoin technology.

Once that has been agreed on, Rutter said, the first use of the technology
might be the issuance of commercial paper on the blockchain._

Can anyone speculate on why they would begin to issue commercial paper?

~~~
aggronn
Probably because they're very short term forms of debt, so if the system has
issues it doesn't exist in for 10 years or however long the instrument lasts.

------
hellbanner
Banks don't always act in citizen's best interest. Don't forget about the
cartel money laundering:
[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/15/hsbc-
ha...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/15/hsbc-has-form-
mexico-laundered-drug-money)

~~~
civilian
The Drug War doesn't have a sound moral basis, so I'm okay that the banks were
undermining western governments in the interest of free trade.

~~~
chimeracoder
> so I'm okay that the banks were undermining western governments in the
> interest of free trade.

I say this as someone who used to work in drug policy reform and strongly
opposes the drug war: Providing money to cartels isn't exactly a noble
proposition either. Banks that do that really do have blood on their hands.
Between 2006-2012, over 100,000 people died incredibly gruesome deaths in
Mexico alone since 2010 at the hands of these cartels[0].

I'm not going to defend the drug war, but I'm not going to defend banks that
willingly funnel money to them either. And I'm not going to claim that
providing money to cartels actually undermines the drug war, in any meaningful
sense. The cartels are, ironically, the largest profiteers of the drug war,
right alongside the LEOs and correctional facilities that enforce drug laws.
Pumping money into the pockets of the drug cartels only further entrenches the
current system; it does not provide pressure to dismantle it.

There are plenty of great ways to work actively to end the drug war. Funding
drug cartels (or enabling their business operations) is not one of them.

[0] The number of deaths in Mexico have dropped slightly since then, but only
because the violence has moved further south in Central America

~~~
aianus
> Pumping money into the pockets of the drug cartels only further entrenches
> the current system; it does not provide pressure to dismantle it.

I would disagree with this sentiment. There is plenty of pressure in Mexico to
decriminalize/legalize drugs as a result of cartel violence.

~~~
chimeracoder
> There is plenty of pressure in Mexico to decriminalize/legalize drugs as a
> result of cartel violence.

First, what Mexico wants has (unfortunately) very little connection to what
the US will actually do, and it's the US's drug policy that matters here.

Second, this is like saying that the arrests and drug-related violence in the
US creates pressure for legalization. It may in a way, because it raises the
stakes, but that's not necessary to create pressure for change. And it's a
rather horrible way to do so, because it involves putting people's lives at
(even more) risk in the meantime. On top of that, it also further empowers the
people who profit off of the status quo, providing them with even more money
(and therefore power and influence) to maintain the status quo.

For comparison, it's a good thing that police violence has gotten attention
recently, which may ultimately lead to substantial reform. But that's not to
say that facilitating (and profiting off of!) police violence in the US is a
noble act.

We can argue about whether the connection is nonexistent or simply 'very
weak', but my point remains that it's hard to defend a profit-hungry bank
funneling money into the hands of violent murders so they can profit off of
more murders, all on the grounds that it will eventually translate into fewer
murders later on. Especially when there are much more compelling ways of
addressing the issue directly and _immediately_.

~~~
nosuchthing
The assumption of the decriminalization/legalization stance is the drug market
has a demand that currently is only supplied by murderous drug syndicates
which is for the most part created by the effects of prohibition.

------
gtrubetskoy
I read this as "we, the banks, want our own blockchain which we control and
you should trust". Only you shouldn't trust it because the whole idea of a
blockchain is that it cannot be influenced/controlled.

~~~
Afforess
No. It is unlikely private citizens will even have access to mine on the
banking blockchain. Banks are looking at using it for intra-banking ledgers
and commercial transactions. Longer term, it may replace the outdated ACH
clearing house.

------
joeyspn
Barclays and UBS have been both recently giving the eye to Ethereum. My bet is
that they are going to go for Ethereum, maybe with a fork a la IBM, and put it
_behind a firewall_.

------
4684499
I guess this basically made fsociety's approach meaningless ;-)

~~~
otisfunkmeyer
and right when we were finally awake...

------
davidgerard
So is this actually a blockchain in the Bitcoin sense, or just a
cryptographically-verifiable ledger, e.g. something based on a Merkle tree?
They're not running competitive proof-of-work or anything.

Or is it "blockchain" only in the buzzword sense of the term?

------
rgawdzik
[https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/641807034292260864](https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/641807034292260864)

------
vessenes
One very interesting difficulty for these guys is going to be deciding on
mining, weighing costs and benefits and threat models..

Ethereum's current mining rates look like they would take a few thousand GPUs
to fork the chain. Bitcoin's costs would be in the $hundred million+ range for
a secret attack.

Edit: Most alt-mining proposals for enterprises do away with any ability to
cost out mining attack vectors at all with some sort of trusted server, keys,
etc.

------
samstave
While I am actually ignorant on the mechanics and architecture of blockchain,
for the most part... I'm wary of anything a conglomerate of banks are doing...

Just look at the LIBOR debacle as one datapoint.

I have zero trust in big banks colluding on things that have the potential to
affect finances for centuries to come.

Change my view?

Edit: anyone who down voted me hasn't been paying attention to the financial
history of banks. Just because YC is tied to finance as an investment POV -
you'd be deluded to think that banks aren't corrupt to the core. Do I really
need to provide you with evidence, how about look at the last fifteen years
for simplicity. Then look into BCCI which I doubt many HNers are even aware
of...

HSBC? Wachovia? Jesus, do any of you know how fucking corrupt banks are??

~~~
Kalium
The article leaves me with the impression that this is more like a standards
body than anything else.

Who would you prefer to have designing and selecting standards for exchanging
financial information?

~~~
samstave
That's not quite what I mean... Sure, banks ___ideally should_ __do such
things... I 'm just saying given they centuries long track records... I still
don't trust any of them.

"Secure" to banks means, only secure enough for them... I just believe that
the future (think 25 years, minimum) is that every single activity of every
single person will be tracked in detail to a level which we can't even
understand now.

Wait until all your activity is then predicted and compared to actual to
refine the tracking. And banks will be doing HFT based on the actual and
projected minute-by-minute actions of billions of people...

What if a stock will fluctuate based on lunch time buying surges and after
work happy hour, and birthday ties to kids having a birthday on Saturday and
their social networks socioeconomic propensity to buy stuff for them last
minute at stores r us?

~~~
wdewind
> What if a stock will fluctuate based on lunch time buying surges and after
> work happy hour, and birthday ties to kids having a birthday on Saturday and
> their social networks socioeconomic propensity to buy stuff for them last
> minute at stores r us?

What's wrong with this?

~~~
samstave
Nothing aside from the fact that you have literally eliminated the "common
man" from even remotely participating in the market...

The entire momentum of the stock HFT market is skewed against everyone except
the HFT masters...

how about, perhaps, build an engine that can do this and allow for people to
buy into slices of it??

I just think that we are literally on the precipice where we will shrink from
a perceived "1%" in power to a ".000001%" in power...

Ten years tops...

~~~
Kalium
> Nothing aside from the fact that you have literally eliminated the "common
> man" from even remotely participating in the market...

Even today, in the world of HFTs, this isn't the case. Long-term positions are
still valid.

The common man was eliminated from regular trading a very long time ago. I
don't see what's to complain about.

------
dnautics
Part of the interesting thing about Bitcoin specifically is that the incentive
to participate and contribute to verification is itself baked into the
protocol. This also enables distributedness. Is there some idea of how this
will work in a more limited setting? What incentive will Charlie's bank have
to validate a transaction between Alice's bank and Bob's bank?

------
powera
I think this is great.

For Bitcoin to really be a useful currency, it needs 1) full faith and credit
of something; 2) mostly not proof-of-work; 3) sub-chains. Right now it is what
I might call an "ur-currency". Paying for everything with the equivalent of a
wheelbarrow of pennies.

Right now Bitcoin only has the backing of Bitcoin enthusiasts, which is a
terrible way to start a currency. No sane person would invest their money in
something that could become worthless if people decide that instead of
Dogecoin, they want Kittycoin. Until there is some way beyond "it's Bitcoin"
to know that Bitcoin will stay valuable (and "9 banks say it will have value"
IS a bona fide reason here), I don't think it will ever have mass appeal.

Also, right now any actual economic value Bitcoin creates will be burned by
mining CPUs. I think it's obvious that the steady state is that Bitcoin miners
make zero economic profit, and all the transaction fees and blockchain rewards
are simply turned into electricity bills (and thus, more indirectly, turned
into needlessly lighting coal on fire).

Finally, from a more technical point of view, all this talk about "the size of
the blockchain" is absurd. There's no reason that there needs to be a limit on
the transactions. But when every transaction needs to be in a single chain,
that's the only way. If we have some smart way of doing sub-chains, this
becomes less of a problem. (I know some altcoins use this now, but the popular
concept of Bitcoin is of a single definitive chain).

------
therealmarv
Is this really something all banks want? Well I don't want a blockchain for my
private transactions where people can see what I pay for. I'm ok for it with
larger interbanking transactions but not every company or bank wants to reveal
every granular transaction. Or do I understand it wrong?

~~~
kuschku
Banks don’t even process those large transactions directly – they just use the
Giro system, meaning each bank tracks how much money they have in debt to
every other bank, and every month, they actually send that money over. So
these inter-bank transactions won’t actually contain stuff like personal
transfers.

------
acd
But with some engineering, do you need Banks at all?

Can you do crypto currency loans and payments p2p without the intermediary?

~~~
lukasm
Sadly, not right now. We need accountability, liability, network of trust,
security to decentralize capital - full distribution is really hard.

We need deregulation in the sector to build future banks to reduce "too big to
fail" factor.

~~~
acd
Thanks for answering.

Here is article on the network of global corporate control
[http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf](http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf)

------
Havoc
That could be interesting.

Won't the blockchain get very large very fast on that scale though? (If I
remember my BC theory right the chain remembers all past transactions,
correct?).

Also - I'm assuming they'll essentially start a new system independent of BC.
How will the initial blocks be divided?

~~~
woah
[http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/716b955c130e6c703fac336ea17b1...](http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/716b955c130e6c703fac336ea17b1670/duplex-
micropayment-channels.pdf)

------
gadders
The CTO of R3 CEV is the same guy that wrote the article mentioned previously
on HN here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351277](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351277)

Seems like they have the right people on board.

------
dmihal
Although the article doesn't really specify, it sounds like these banks plan
on making their own blockchain instead of using the Bitcoin blockchain.

I'm curious to see how the blockchain will preform without the Bitcoin network
backing it.

~~~
Animats
From the article: _“I think that these technologies will probably be post-
trade,” he said. “I think savings are in the settlement side, in post-trade,
in issuance, but not in exchange trading or OTC trading any time in the near
future.” He added that R3 will soon announce a few more banks joining the
project. "_

That makes sense. This replaces the need for a single trusted clearinghouse
with a redundant, shared ledger. Confirmation occurs when a majority of the
banks have put a new transaction into a block. Because the parties are not
anonymous and new ones can only be added by mutual agreement, it's like a
"proof of stake" system. There's no need for "mining".

Bitcoin has done a good job of validating a blockchain system as being secure
against attack. No one has broken it yet. None of this, of course, does
anything for Bitcoin as a currency/investment.

~~~
mdpopescu
I don't think a large government has tried yet; this would create an
interesting incentive for one to do so. See Operation Bernhard
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bernhard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bernhard)
with "on the internet" appended to it.

------
misterbishop
This could make it a lot easier to implement/audit a Tobin Tax. I like it.

------
im3w1l
Mining is only needed to prevent sybil attacks, so could be dispensed with if
they code it from scratch.

------
giancarlostoro
As long as they start their own blockchain I think it would be interesting.
Otherwise it's a bit of a hassle to use the current blockchain, I would use
the same codebase and not start from scratch though since the code's been
tried and tested, and as they said you can send messages through bitcoin as
well already.

~~~
colordrops
Could you expound a bit on why you think it makes more sense to use their own
blockchain?

~~~
darkr
Means they can run a closed pool on a secure network - reduces/eliminates
(depending on implementation) risk of forking due to Chinese ASIC farms etc.

My understanding is that the first usage of blockchain would just be an inter-
bank shared ledger.

~~~
colordrops
So what's the incentivization scheme for banks to run their own mining
operations? And is there any real threat of a fork?

------
PedroBatista
World’s Biggest Banks Form [______] Partnership

What could possibly go wrong?

------
sam_lowry_
Think of the carbon footprint these banks will have if they invest into
mining.

~~~
scott_karana
Think of their _current_ carbon footprint, which requires reams of paper to be
printed and shipped offsite every single day. How many forests per day are
consumed internationally?

Now, switch that to hydroelectrically powered mining datacentres. Net win? I
suspect so.

------
s_q_b
Thus, with great fanfare, did they begin their own obsolescence...

------
godisdad
Did they have any choice?

