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Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

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Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#141

Post by pbreit »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #65
code4tee wrote: post #18

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…

I’ve been thinking a model for such a distributed ledger is Usenet/nntp where multiple partial copies of the data is stored on various servers.

If one were to deploy a non-blockchain version of such a thing, what would it actually look like?

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#142

Post by pbreit »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #118
bayesian_horse wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> does not require the individual instances to have perfect connectivity and perfect trust all the time. 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…

Aren’t these all implementation details?

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#143

Post by lmpostor »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #131
lmpostor wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent response. Though here is another perspective I thought of. What the usage of blockchain would allow is a chain of liability to exist among different companies in the supply chain. If you are signing off on a product, you are verifying the authenticity of the item, and if it arrives defective at the next location you assume liability. As a customer, what you would really leverage, is the incentive of every i…

But since it's working with legal liability there's no need for blockchain. That can be done through standard contracts and having companies certify that their items are authentic. You still need such a contract with a blockchain, all the blockchain adds is some complexity.

I mean the question is if the complexity is needless.

Blockchain generally forces some level of standardization or there will be rejection, as well as being incredibly easy to audit.

In a well functioning system, there is little benefit, but I would say that a blockchain based system elevates the floor of a functioning system due to its nature.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#144

Post by sixdimensional »

lmpostor wrote: post #126
SkyPuncher wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does not require the individual instances to have perfect connectivity and perfect trust all the time. 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…

Excellent response. Though here is another perspective I thought of. What the usage of blockchain would allow is a chain of liability to exist among different companies in the supply chain. If you are signing off on a product, you are verifying the authenticity of the item, and if it arrives defective at the next location you assume liability. As a customer, what you would really leverage, is the incentive of every i…

Can a block chain be poisoned by malicious actors easily? I hope not. I guess if there is a gate that prevents malicious actors from entering/participating in a block chain network... but how does identity verification on block chain work? Digital signatures of block chain content?

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#145

Post by the_jeremy »

carbocation wrote: post #33
SkyPuncher wrote: post #27

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.

I don't think he's saying that blockchain is required to solve this problem, just that even with blockchain, the problem is not solved.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#146

Post by sixdimensional »

maccio92 wrote: post #57
code4tee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but there are far easier ways to solve that problem. Digital signing of data to protect against alteration has been around for ages and doesn’t require “blockchain.”

> Digital signing of data When you get to the heart of things, that's all blockchain is anyway. The "blockchain" part really just describes how it's organized - in a signed chain

It occurred to me also that you’d have to include trust, a la digital signatures as part of the solution also or the whole discussion wouldn’t make sense. If the block chain network actors aren’t trusted it leaves too much room for malicious behavior on the block chain itself.

I also wonder how efficient it is to “query the block chain”?

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#147

Post by simias »

Spooky23 wrote: post #110
simias wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the article was talking about Walmart using PKI with business partners, this thread would be grousing about how dumb CAs are. Would we? That seems like a perfectly reasonable solution to me. You have a clear central authority here who could be issuing certificates to trusted third parties. It's a perfect fit for a CA and a bad fit for a blockchain.

The PKI model is awesome for less dynamic environments. Factories and suppliers are a great example of that. Produce is more dynamic and 100% cost driven. You have multiple, unsophisticated suppliers that shift based on season, weather, etc. These folks are located in the middle of nowhere in many cases and may or may not have connectivity. Carting the produce from these suppliers to distribution is performed by any…

Surely legally speaking they have to do a minimum amount of vetting for their suppliers. They also probably need to negotiate prices and quantities at the very least. Sending the supplier a certificate in the process doesn't seem particularly complex (especially since it's easily fully automated and no more complicated than setting up a blockchain "account", however that works).

I mean what are you proposing exactly, that anybody can stuff a bunch of Lettuce in a truck, send it to Wallmart while generating a wallet address on WallmartCoin? Where's the traceability there exactly? What stops me from lying about the quality of my product or even who I am? What if I just wait for a farmer in my area to send a delivery of lettuce and impersonate them on the blockchain, how can it resolve the issue and figure out who did what? What if I buy cheap product from abroad and resell it as organic locally grown lettuce?

>Bitcoin demonstrated that a large number of unknown parties can successfully store and transfer value.

No, a large number of unknown parties can successfully transfer purely digital goods. As long as lettuce doesn't grow on the blockchain you'll need some kind of third party oracle to actually keep track of physical goods.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#148

Post by lmpostor »

sixdimensional wrote: post #144
lmpostor wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent response. Though here is another perspective I thought of. What the usage of blockchain would allow is a chain of liability to exist among different companies in the supply chain. If you are signing off on a product, you are verifying the authenticity of the item, and if it arrives defective at the next location you assume liability. As a customer, what you would really leverage, is the incentive of every i…

Can a block chain be poisoned by malicious actors easily? I hope not. I guess if there is a gate that prevents malicious actors from entering/participating in a block chain network... but how does identity verification on block chain work? Digital signatures of block chain content?

I'm not sure how to answer this as it would require more context in regarding to what you consider a malicious actor and I would need more details regarding the blockchain in question.

But in regards to identity verification, you are correct that it would be through digital signatures controlled by private keys. In order for malicious actors to masquerade as legitimate ones, they would have to steal these private keys. That can both be easy and hard, but that is probably going to have a relatively strict correlation to how much is at stake.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#149

Post by module0000 »

Milner08 wrote: post #70
duxup wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM really seems stuck in their old systems / and at some level doesn't understand what to do with new systems. I was talking to someone who was using the "IBM cloud". They went to spin up some servers and etc and IBM was all "that will take a few weeks, we have to install them". At least to me "cloud" includes the ability to spin stuff up on demand.... IBM was operating it like you were ordering from a very old co-l…

I hate to defend IBM (I used to work there and have nothing good to say) but its likely they were using the "Private Cloud" which is exactly what you say, co-location in the IBM Datacenter. Its just marketing rubbish.

"IBM Cloud Private" - it's a fascinating product that can be summed up as "We package kubernetes for you, and you pay us 2 million dollars. If you are a huge customer, we'll discount that to 1.6 million dollars."

Trying to keep from maniacal laughing during their sales pitches is always a fun game.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#150

Post by njarboe »

lmpostor wrote: post #143
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But since it's working with legal liability there's no need for blockchain. That can be done through standard contracts and having companies certify that their items are authentic. You still need such a contract with a blockchain, all the blockchain adds is some complexity.

I mean the question is if the complexity is needless. Blockchain generally forces some level of standardization or there will be rejection, as well as being incredibly easy to audit. In a well functioning system, there is little benefit, but I would say that a blockchain based system elevates the floor of a functioning system due to its nature.

As you stated, blockchains can be quite useful in a low trust environment. Thus currently most of its use cases are by criminals or transactions that can't be easily adjudicated, like international money transfers. I hope that the cryptocurrency craze is more just a standard get-rich-quick ponzi scheme in action than a sign that the West's hard won high trust culture is changing to a low trust one.
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