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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

#41

Post by code4tee »

maratd wrote: post #35
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…

> There’s nothing being done here that couldn’t or shouldn’t just be handled with a traditional database. I generally agree with you and if I had to implement the solution, I wouldn't do so with blockchain. That said, if there's a concern about data manipulation from Walmart's side (that is, employees erasing or modifying the data), blockchain would help with that.

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.”

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#42

Post by viach »

Many comments are saying here "it's just a database, you don't need blockchain for the public events log". Private blockchain become more understandable when you dive into the level of corruption and data manipulation happening within big corporations. It's just much more complex to change a row in blockchain than in good old SQL database, that's it.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#43

Post by aaaaaaaaaab »

dsr_ wrote: post #25
s_kilk wrote: post #4

Will this idiotic mind-virus never die?

Of course it will. Fads come and go. Remember when everything was going to be CORBA? Or when all user interfaces were done in Flash? And right now AI/ML is taking over from blockchain, and lots of it will be written by people who don't know what a linear regression is and once heard of p-hacking but couldn't make up an example of it.

>Or when all user interfaces were done in Flash?

Or in JS.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#44

Post by technofiend »

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…

And it doesn't really prevent bad food entering the food supply chain; at best it just documents where it originated. So the next time someone is sicknened headlines reading "The IBM food chain (TM) failed to protect consumers" seem inevitable. Seems like a big reputational liability for marginal upside.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#45

Post by kelvin0 »

To me great business innovations needs 2 equal forces: 1) The marketing and customer oriented drive 2) The scientific, technological and engineering side.

If you only have one of each, any success is surely fickle and will quickly dissolve.

If one force (Marketing in this case) overwhelms the other, then of course you have 'Blockchains' to track food. Not saying that there isn't a need for this, but it smells funny. I'm surprised there isn't a 'Deep Neural Network' used also to make things look even more 'cutting edge' ....

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#46

Post by Spooky23 »

code4tee wrote: post #41
maratd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s nothing being done here that couldn’t or shouldn’t just be handled with a traditional database. I generally agree with you and if I had to implement the solution, I wouldn't do so with blockchain. That said, if there's a concern about data manipulation from Walmart's side (that is, employees erasing or modifying the data), blockchain would help with that.

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.”

If the article was talking about Walmart using PKI with business partners, this thread would be grousing about how dumb CAs are.

If you look at blockchain as something almost like a cousin of PGP in the sense that you distribute signing operations it’s actually an interesting and novel technology.

Fundamentally, you could use clipboards and wet signatures to get the same result. That doesn’t mean that this approach is flawed.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#47

Post by hallihax »

This essentially just feels like a PR push so that Walmart can claim 'better than the competition' food regulation, without actually opening up the system to be....regulated.

There's no wider benefit to the public from this unless the chain is publicly verifiable, imo.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#49

Post by hazz99 »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #30
muthdra wrote: post #23

(Image) Do I need a blockchain? https://i1.wp.com/potdar.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ima...

Eh, I think it's more like "Do you need a decentralized write-once database where you trust none of the writers? Then yes. Otherwise, no."

Yeah, that's a dumb slide. It's true that most people don't need a blockchain, but most is not all.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#50

Post by maccio92 »

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…

Decentralization is critical to cryptocurrencies, but that's just one use case on top of an entire blockchain ecosystem. Not all blockchains need to be decentralized, and not all blockchains are cryptocurrencies.

This specific instance grants assurance that neither Walmart or anyone in-between is tampering with the database.

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