Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

I guess the "Blockchain" part.

Blockchain is a decentralised way to create trusted record without a trusted counterparty, i.e. centralised.

In this case, there is nothing decentralised, you need to go through IBM as with a regular system. Blockchain is only mentioned as marketing to convince you they are reliable. A bit how some hosting service tell you their are using S3 to convince you they are not going to lose your data.

edit: The problem is the title of the article that let you imagine there is some interesting blockchain tech being developed. Instead that's about as interesting as "Walmart uses SAP"

If it's not intended to be a decentralized system in the first place, the "blockchain" aspect is useless and turns from being a clever hack that allows to generate a certain level of trust from distributed participants, thus enabling the decentralization in the first place, to a marketing ploy that, if not just being lip-service but actually implemented, is a huge resource hog and severely reduces scalability and maintainability of the system without offering any benefits whatsoever.

Because of this situation it is natural to assume that a blockchain-based system must either have a decentralization aspect to it, or that the architects of the system are incompetent. And we don't want to assume there's such gross incompetence at IBM, do we? ;-)

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 database.

A signed block chain would give you a log of events where each party in the chain signs the new block (which includes a hash of the previous block) using their private key. The block can then be verified using each entities public key. To modify this system you would need to be able to breach the trust of the private keys.

{Lettuce from Farm A on date, }[Signed by farm A] => {Received lettuce on date, }[Signed by shipping agent] => {Received lettuce on data, }[Signed by Walmart store], etc

In theory then, Walmart would have a registry of the public keys of each agent in the chain, and upon receiving produce could verify the events of the whole block?

Since so many comments on this thread are so absolutely negative, I will try to play devil's advocate here.

Is a given blockchain a more efficient database? Not efficient measured by percent of data stored in any given entry, which of course throughput and any other, "engineering metric," will suffer because of that. As an engineer, the idea of wasted energy, memory, space, etc., makes one cringe.

Efficient from the standpoint of preventing loss of human life or preventing sickness? Well, in the United States where likely most of us live, this is not as big of a problem, but likely in many other countries such as China, "food authenticity," is a problem. Let's keep in mind that Walmart has more stores and customers in China and more problems with food than the United States by orders of magnitude.

If I'm an actor within the food system in China which presumably has multiple middle-men, and I want to move one product up the supply chain through multiple, ultimately ending up on the shelves at Walmart, then I will not want to give away my source, because I want to get preferential pricing. However if I can convince my suppler upstream to use this tool (it doesn't matter if it's IBM, Google, Alibaba, or some startup or whatever, it's just a tech tool), to track and register when food was, "picked" or "harvested" then I don't have to give information to my buyer about the source, yet the database is all, "standardized," in terms of labeling. Keep in mind the alternative would be some kind of bar coding system which perhaps Walmart would have to impose. Well, I don't want my upstream partners knowing that this is going to Walmart either, otherwise they will jack up the pricing. If everyone is using some IBM tool, and assuming the IBM tool sees increasing adoption, then no one (hopefully) knows where or who a particular food is going to, yet any problem foods can be tracked back to their source by the end seller, without having to impose multiple types of key-value pair, bar-coding database systems, which - while technically easier to implement and run more smoothly from an engineering standpoint, perhaps do not take the entire use case into mind, because parties within the supply chain may be unwilling to share their source or destination due to pricing incentives.

Mind you, I am no food systems expert, I am just trying to talk hypotheticals here. I think the knee-jerk reaction on Hacker News within this thread is an almost Redditian "reaping karma" approach by putting down Blockchain, because many of us have had bad experiences working with corporate executives who have no idea how various types of technology work, and implementing non-technology buzzwords ends up being painful. That being said Blockchain at its heart, stripping away the history, is just a mathematical concept, and it's a math tool that can be used to point from one source to another. Calling it a, "mind disease," is losing sight of that.

Typically the types of discussions on hacker news that I enjoy reading are more angled toward how do you reverse engineer things, not just insulting an idea without backing up one's insult.

Yeah blockchain seems like overkill here.

But the world of corporatism is just as susceptible to fads like every other subculture.

It's like execs are desperate to force blockchain on every problem because it's the hip new thing. Even though most problems don't need blockchains and there are far better and simpler solutions.

Similar to the nosql fad. Who needs ACID compliance? If things fail silently and we lose a few transactions here and there, what could go wrong? Get with the times. The cool kids are into nosql now.