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Thexalon writes:

The New York Times reports that several large banks, as well as the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, and the Nasdaq exchange are working on reusing the software ideas from Bitcoin to facilitate high-finance money transfers.

The Bitcoin network, on the other hand, is run by a decentralized network of users who jointly keep track of transactions and update the records in real time, with no single user or company in charge. The records of all transactions are kept on a public ledger — essentially just a big, publicly available spreadsheet — known as the blockchain that is visible to anyone and has, at least so far, proven impossible to tamper with.

Much of the work being done inside banks, and in other industries, is looking at whether the blockchain technology can be used independent of the Bitcoin virtual currency, which was the first thing to be recorded on the blockchain ledger.

This is probably not what anyone involved in Bitcoin had in mind, but open-source software tends to adapt to new applications extremely easily.

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