10 ms·
Coming from a logistics background, coordinating tracability data is painful within a company, even with help of ERP like SAP. But when you need tracability acr
by donmatito 9y ago
Coming from a logistics background, coordinating tracability data is painful within a company, even with help of ERP like SAP. But when you need tracability across an industry, it becomes almost impossible.
I had professional experience in an industry where we had to go to the plants to ensure rolls of paper certified from suppliers using responsibly-managed forests were physically separated from the non-certified ones. We needed the paperwork coming from China, then another one from the transformation plant in Morocco, then in customer warehouses across Europe.
An external protocol that would provide universal tracability, usable by any actor of the chain, seem like a great solution to a real problem. Blockchain provides some "neutrality", ie no need for each actor to find its own certificate provider (I imagine that service shops would help larger companies set up their systems, but the back-end would be common across all actors).
I'm not very convinced by pseudo-decentralized apps in most domains, but in logistics... very bullish !
- cm2187 9y agowouldn't a simple system of signatures certified by a certificate authority (like for the web) solve this problem in a much more direct way?
- ravenstine 9y agoWhat's to keep a party from chucking out a signed document that they don't like?
- jpollock 9y agoThe check is a positive one for presence. Items which aren't tagged are untrusted. If they throw out a signature they don't like, the system works perfectly fine - it's treated like any other untrusted product. No one should trust a system that has a "don't trust this, it's bad" flag, it should always be "trust this, it's clean".
- spookthesunset 9y ago> What's to keep a party from chucking out a signed document that they don't like? Courts. Laws. Governments.
- donmatito 9y agoI have read somewhere else a very interesting way to look at token projects. There are merely incentive for protocols that could have been baked into our browser. For example, we could have had an identity verification protocol, bound to our browsers, that would have logged us in websites. We would not have needed FB oauth for ex. But it was not prioritized, and now that the Web has been taken over by closed garden, individual companies have very little incentive to contribute to these general-benefits protocols. Token can be seen a way to incentivize adoption of these general-benefits protocols
- simias 9y agoIf anybody can enter and add entries to your blockchain, how do you ensure that they don't insert bogus data? If you're tracing a roll of paper what prevents somebody from adding an entry saying "the shipment got stolen" then immediately making a new entry for it with different attributes pretending it's something else? Or simply at the source pretending that something is of a higher quality than it is? The answer is that you need some kind of vetting and certification of the people contributing to your traceability database. So you need a trusted 3rd party to coordinate all that. So you don't need a blockchain. Instead why not just have the trusted 3rd party issue certificates like a CA on the web for instance? People would digitally sign the paperwork and you could collect the documents and their signatures in a central database. If somebody notices something wrong you can show that somebody made a fake or erroneous document and hold them responsible. Then you can publish dump of the database at regular intervals for people to mirror so that they can see if you attempt to rewrite history. There, problem solved using good old 1990's technology. >very bullish ! Interesting that you finish your technical argument with trading lingo. Hodl, am I right?
- asynchrony 9y agoThis is generally my main source of skepticism relating to blockchain solutions. The ledger is 100% trustable as long as it describes digital assets that are entirely confined within the distributed ledger, but a digital token doesn't stop men with guns from taking your house. Just like a digital signature provides no guarantees that the associated information is true.
- prostoalex 9y ago> usable by any actor of the chain Do you really want an immutable ledger for that? Fat fingers and data entry errors can happen.
- donmatito 9y agoI don't know. What about Git ? Errors happen, then you correct them, but you can see the error and its correction, and it's considered quite healthy, right?
- Cookingboy 9y agoYou might want to look into VeChain then, which is a blockchain platform aimed at solving that exact problem, and is already being used by large customers such as DVG NL and China Tobacco. Jim Breyer and DFJ are both strong backers. https://medium.com/@jimbreyer/announcing-our-vechain-advisory-role-5e37b7722978 https://medium.com/@jimbreyer/announcing-our-vechain-advisor... https://www.vechain.org/ https://www.vechain.org/
- donmatito 9y agono need to shill here. I don't know which projects will end up successful, I am however convinced that some of them will be
- rellui 9y agoI feel like shilling contains a lot of negative connotation. Most people still don't know that there are existing coins aiming to solve this exact issue. Some other coins are Ambrosus and WaltonChain. There are a few others that I can't recall on top of my head. So it seems like there are people out there that have recognized this specific use case and started capitalizing it.
- ballenf 9y agoWhat you've described is provenance I believe. And that is the only, imho, use case for blockchain that makes any sense. It's the only one where the substantial additional overhead and complexity of blockchain is actually still less than the alternative, as your example clearly illustrates. To attempt to answer a question from sibling comments: these systems are private or closed blockchains, not public. You have a traditional credentials database (the blockchain itself could also be used for this, but that won't usually have inherent benefits) to track who is allowed access to read or submit transactions. Those parties may run a node or you may have one independent third party run all the nodes. It's so different from cryptocurrency setup that it's hard to apply too much of the stuff we've learned from Bitcoin et al to these setups. At least that's my understanding.
- donmatito 9y agoI feel like a private/closed blockchain would defeat the purpose. I want a future where a public blockchain would act a repository of everything that has happened to the final product throughout its history, on top of which applications would be developped, relevant for each step of the chain. The producer A that would input certification of origin, the manufacturer B, and the end consumer C would need very different services, web, app, industrial applications, ERP integrations and so on. To express it in an analogy with current services, I would like the blockchain to be a database, exposing a universal API. I don't really see a private blockchain allowing this, but I may be wrong. And indeed there will be the thorny authentication issue... I don't know the solution, really !
- s73v3r_ 9y agoSo why use a blockchain instead of a regular database?
- filleokus 9y agoIf we imagine the best-case scenario, where all actors are handling their keys with care, and a system works to somehow produce an immutable, always consistent log of all actions, I still don't see how this will be usable for most products. You basically also need an immutable link between the physical product and some kind of cryptographically provable ID in this magic log. When receiving an item you want to check the provenance of, you need some way to securely identify the product in the log. Otherwise some bad actor along the way could unlink the actual product from the ID in the log, for example by duplicating and stealing a known-good ID, yielding all the provenance information useless. I guess this could work for electronic products where you could deeply embed something like a TPM that could provide this ID securely (which would be to expensive to extract to make it worth duplicating), but for something like a shipment of steel or even worse coal/oil/grain etc, I don't see how this would work.