111–120 of 196 posts
There are two reasons to use a blockchain: to avoid double spending in an adversarial environment, and to avoid central control of a database. This application requires neither, and this implementation accomplishes neither.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get that either. Absent proof-of-work (which is however terribly energetically wasteful), blockchain is just a public GIT repository where every commit is signed, no?
I agree that it's a buzzword, but at least intuitively, a signed blockchain (in the true sense that each block contains a hash of the previous block) does seem to confer some additional security over a plain database. A plain database would give you a log of events and who logged them, but security and trust resides in the database and how it's authenticated. Anyone with sufficient permissions could modify the databa…
But now you've also raised the technical requirements and are betting the security on non-technical farmers and farm staff. Even if they have technical chops since farm equipment is more complex these days, they likely don't have security chops.
There's already 'country-of-origin' scams in international shipping, so it's not a far stretch to apply the same concept to farming supply chains. Throw a disposable proxy farm in front of your real farms and change the origin. When it's human-entered information, blockchain doesn't prevent someone being dishonest from the beginning, and it lures people into a false sense of security because of IBM's advertising.
I guess limiting fraud to the beginning of the supply chain is a step in the right direction though. I don't think blockchain solves chain-of-custody well though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know the details of that particular system, but what you say doesn't necessarily preclude a block chain system.
It doesn't preclude it, sure, but what stinky613 said does mean that a blockchain does not offer particular advantages over a more traditional datastore (regardless of how that datastore is accessed). I believe that was their point: that in this situation, a blockchain requires more effort for no additional benefit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason only 250 get sick is because of the notification. Traffic accidents aren’t contagious. Comparing a static risk and a dynamic risk is inappropriate. If lettuce is contaminated with ecoli at the source and you don’t recall/stop people eating it, you will have much more adverse health events. Different outbreaks have different responses and sometimes that includes notifying the at risk population and the sour…
Let's compare the same things, then. 73 million Americans are infected with E.coli every year and 5,000 die. Only 5 died in this outbreak. You think that number was significantly reduced because it was announced that there was a single small outbreak? The outbreak was minor, but the effect on the economy and people's state of mind was overwhelmingly more powerful. It's fine to notify an at risk population if you can,…
"CDC estimates that each year STEC [Shiga toxin-producing E. coli] causes 265,000 illness, 3,600 hospitalizations and 30 deaths in the United States."
Alternate solution: do not announce small foodbourne illness outbreaks. In the article's example, 250 people got sick from a lettuce outbreak, and everyone stopped buying lettuce, hitting the whole industry. But 5 million people get sick from Norovirus alone in the US every year. Leafy vegetables like lettuce are the most common source of food illness. Telling people about a minor outbreak is just letting them freak…
Still a minor risk to the population, but a greater risk to brands like Walmart.
IBM is quietly brushing its Watson mess under the carpet and now they’re trying to focus on blockchain. However this is just as substanceless and full of marketing fluff as Watson was. There’s nothing being done here that couldn’t or shouldn’t just be handled with a traditional database. Having IBM “run it” also sort of defeats the whole decentralized aspect of blockchain technologies. You don’t need “blockchain” to…
As I understand it, a blockchain is a decentralized database which does not require the individual instances to have perfect connectivity and perfect trust all the time. I can see why that would be something worth doing in a food chain. To trace, for example, a particular load of soy beans to a customer eating a steak, there are a couple of completely autonomous companies/sole proprietors involved. From the original…
Specifically, perfect trust in the log itself. Blockchain gives you a guard against someone trying to retroactively tamper with the log. It doesn't give you a whole lot of help with the points where data enters the log in the first place.
e.g., the blockchain solution to, "there was a network partition when you tried to enter that transaction, and you entered it on the smaller partition" is to declare that that transaction never happened. I can't see how this is an acceptable solution for logistics. With Bitcoin it's easy enough to say that the blockchain is reality, but with supply chain management, it doesn't matter that the blockchain says your kumquats are in a warehouse in LA; if they're on a train bound for Chicago, they're on a train bound for Chicago.
IBM is quietly brushing its Watson mess under the carpet and now they’re trying to focus on blockchain. However this is just as substanceless and full of marketing fluff as Watson was. There’s nothing being done here that couldn’t or shouldn’t just be handled with a traditional database. Having IBM “run it” also sort of defeats the whole decentralized aspect of blockchain technologies. You don’t need “blockchain” to…
As I understand it, a blockchain is a decentralized database which does not require the individual instances to have perfect connectivity and perfect trust all the time. I can see why that would be something worth doing in a food chain. To trace, for example, a particular load of soy beans to a customer eating a steak, there are a couple of completely autonomous companies/sole proprietors involved. From the original…
The blockchain does not solve the trust issue in this scenario.
Blockchains only work there is a verify unit entirely enclosed in the system - including the origins of any "unit" on the system.
* Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc - "coins" are a completely digital concept fully enclosed by the system. "coins" are generated in a predictable, consensus based manner with consensus based means of exchanging their value.
* Distributed Filesharing - "files" are stored in encrypted in a verifiable manner. I have an identity (or multiple identities) on the system which I can use to verify the source. Trust does become a factor in something like Civil where credibility is attached to a trust that an author actually published something.
* Food - involves a physical good that cannot be verified by the "blockchain". I can verify that SOME item went through a certain set of checkpoints. I can possibly verify that the SAME item went through a certain set of checkpoints. I cannot however verify the authenticity of any item before entering into the system. I have to rely on a middle-man (e.g. Walmart, Kroger, Whole Foods, etc) to verify authenticity at the origin point. They also have to implement safe guards that ensure goods cannot be tampered with between checkpoints. That relies on trusting the middleman to have appropriate safeguards in place.
IBM is quietly brushing its Watson mess under the carpet and now they’re trying to focus on blockchain. However this is just as substanceless and full of marketing fluff as Watson was. There’s nothing being done here that couldn’t or shouldn’t just be handled with a traditional database. Having IBM “run it” also sort of defeats the whole decentralized aspect of blockchain technologies. You don’t need “blockchain” to…
As I understand it, a blockchain is a decentralized database which does not require the individual instances to have perfect connectivity and perfect trust all the time. I can see why that would be something worth doing in a food chain. To trace, for example, a particular load of soy beans to a customer eating a steak, there are a couple of completely autonomous companies/sole proprietors involved. From the original…
User account security and role/employer based data masking across all companies and all data are the key requirement, lack of the central intermediary is table stakes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Watching there "Blockchain" commercial was infuriating to me. I saw absolutely no way that the "Blockchain" was solving any meaningful problem. Unless each plant can be uniquely and irrevocably tagged from the time it's planted to the time it's in my bowl, this whole thing is useless.
> Unless each plant can be uniquely and irrevocably tagged from the time it's planted to the time it's in my bowl, this whole thing is useless. To nitpick a bit -- even this would not require a blockchain.