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Logistics are a great place for this technology, but first you must purge your mind of Cryptotokens and their economics. They aren't applicable for a logistics

Logistics are a great place for this technology, but first you must purge your mind of Cryptotokens and their economics. They aren't applicable for a logistics use case. To understand this, first you have to understand why we structure mining. In the case of Bitcoin or Ethereum, you need a method that allows any arbitrary computational device to verify and add to a given blockchain. In lieu of trusting that device, the blockchain makes it do a massive amount of busywork, called mining, to prove it isn't bullshitting the network. Different implementations have different busywork, but it's designed to make it hard to change the network by arbitrary devices. This is why we can allow any untrusted device on the network. In the case of logistics, we are already operating under some amount of trust. This is through a mechanism of certification of goods, suppliers, verifying the goods are what they say they are, and the verification of those approvals and certifications. Even in a trusted environment, managing that coordination of certifying and verifying is slow, bureaucratic, and grows with the size of the logistic network. Additionally, many supply chains generally certify new entrants before allowing them to contribute. This creates a barrier to entry when establishing trust in the same way busywork creates a barrier for devices. Then there are whole units of auditors that go through and recheck all those certifications to make sure the whole chain is authentic with regards to the goods moving through it. Blockchain technology is a mechanism of creating certifications (signing a transaction) and verifying those certifications (miners/verifiers on a chain) that can operate in a decentralized but coordinated way. It allows for the whole system to better coordinate information and certification that used to be done manually. Did you notice I never mentioned tokens?

shanghaiaway 9y ago
You also did not answer the question. How do you verify that the physical objects the digital certificate is attached to, is actually attached to the things it is meant to certify, and not replacement counterfeit?
- JamesLeonis 9y ago
  The same way you verify it now. The technology does not change the process of physically inspecting the product. It makes it far easier to coordinate the paperwork of certifying and verifying. At it's heart logistics is a global concurrency problem. The "locks" we use now are large sprawling bureaucracies that manually coordinate the transfer of information among many independently moving agents. Getting information into and out of this organization is a tedious, labor-intensive, and time consuming process. The technology that empowers cryptotokens is an alternate computerized concurrency management for this kind of information transfer and lookup that doesn't rely on a central organization or system.
  - ric2b 9y ago
    Ok, but if _someone_ is certifying who can and who cannot write to the blockchain, why wasn't this solved 2 decades ago with that someone running a database with an API front-end that all involved parties can use?
donmatito 9y ago
Thank you for expressing all this much better than I could
natural219 9y ago
I'd love to read more about this if you or someone else has written about it in-depth. I'm still not clear on the connection between "mining" (spending computing power) and the type of work that logistics professionals do when verifying parts of your supply chain.
- JamesLeonis 9y ago
  Mining, or intentional computational busywork, is one method of allowing anonymous transaction processors, uh, process transactions. A logistics system does not need anonymous transactors; it can rely on it's own network of trust. A logistics solution is much more like Proof of Stake model, where reputation is the collateral instead of a fictional financial token. In this model, I'll refer to it as Proof of Reputation (PoR), an actor might be a certified as a reputable party in the network. You might be a certified producer of bananas, verified and certified as fair trade and humane organic hand-crafted conditions by other organizations. I'm a buyer of bananas, but I want to make sure I'm buying fair trade bananas. I can look at your certification-of-origin and verify that you are reputable as fair trade. A port authority can confirm that I bought your bananas and put them on the USS Boaty McBoatface destined for Los Angeles to meet the huge banana split market. You as a consumer can check these certifications at the store. As it stands, all of these processes operate haphazardly and it's insanely difficult for major countries to coordinate and verify what is going on. The coordination technologies, like Ethereum's GHOST implementation, combined with public-key infrastructure helps reduce the "deadlock" time of coordinating these large public and private bureaucracies. I know I'm not explaining this well. I'm still working on a more concrete model. In my mind the process of creating, signing, and verifying a cryptotoken transaction is eerily similar to what logistics management is all about. You need to prove the origin, verify they made the transaction, and then have a reputable actor process said transaction. There's still a lot of manual work, but the system of sharing and coordinating that work is also painful and manual. The technologies that power cryptotokens can help with the latter problem.
amorphous 9y ago
Thanks a lot for your explanations. I'm very interested in that space. However, I'm a complete outsider. Would you have any pointers how to break into logistics + blockchain space as a developer? Like blogs to follow, companies, suitable jobs etc? Very much appreciated
rdo2018 9y ago
This is helpful I am total neophyte when it comes to blockchain but its continued to surface in a number of conversation that seem credible- I need to launch a anonymous,but verified, de-centralized but coordinated way where users can contribute and consume with appropriate transaction costs- Blockchain seems to be an approach, as an underlying structure but I am concerned that its too hyped to be taken seriously and also seems to compete directly with other database approaches that today have computational scale issues but wont always due to low cost distributed technology- thoughts?

shanghaiaway 9y ago

You also did not answer the question. How do you verify that the physical objects the digital certificate is attached to, is actually attached to the things it is meant to certify, and not replacement counterfeit?

JamesLeonis 9y ago
The same way you verify it now. The technology does not change the process of physically inspecting the product. It makes it far easier to coordinate the paperwork of certifying and verifying. At it's heart logistics is a global concurrency problem. The "locks" we use now are large sprawling bureaucracies that manually coordinate the transfer of information among many independently moving agents. Getting information into and out of this organization is a tedious, labor-intensive, and time consuming process. The technology that empowers cryptotokens is an alternate computerized concurrency management for this kind of information transfer and lookup that doesn't rely on a central organization or system.
- ric2b 9y ago
  Ok, but if _someone_ is certifying who can and who cannot write to the blockchain, why wasn't this solved 2 decades ago with that someone running a database with an API front-end that all involved parties can use?

donmatito 9y ago

Thank you for expressing all this much better than I could

natural219 9y ago

I'd love to read more about this if you or someone else has written about it in-depth. I'm still not clear on the connection between "mining" (spending computing power) and the type of work that logistics professionals do when verifying parts of your supply chain.

JamesLeonis 9y ago
Mining, or intentional computational busywork, is one method of allowing anonymous transaction processors, uh, process transactions. A logistics system does not need anonymous transactors; it can rely on it's own network of trust. A logistics solution is much more like Proof of Stake model, where reputation is the collateral instead of a fictional financial token. In this model, I'll refer to it as Proof of Reputation (PoR), an actor might be a certified as a reputable party in the network. You might be a certified producer of bananas, verified and certified as fair trade and humane organic hand-crafted conditions by other organizations. I'm a buyer of bananas, but I want to make sure I'm buying fair trade bananas. I can look at your certification-of-origin and verify that you are reputable as fair trade. A port authority can confirm that I bought your bananas and put them on the USS Boaty McBoatface destined for Los Angeles to meet the huge banana split market. You as a consumer can check these certifications at the store. As it stands, all of these processes operate haphazardly and it's insanely difficult for major countries to coordinate and verify what is going on. The coordination technologies, like Ethereum's GHOST implementation, combined with public-key infrastructure helps reduce the "deadlock" time of coordinating these large public and private bureaucracies. I know I'm not explaining this well. I'm still working on a more concrete model. In my mind the process of creating, signing, and verifying a cryptotoken transaction is eerily similar to what logistics management is all about. You need to prove the origin, verify they made the transaction, and then have a reputable actor process said transaction. There's still a lot of manual work, but the system of sharing and coordinating that work is also painful and manual. The technologies that power cryptotokens can help with the latter problem.

amorphous 9y ago

Thanks a lot for your explanations. I'm very interested in that space. However, I'm a complete outsider. Would you have any pointers how to break into logistics + blockchain space as a developer? Like blogs to follow, companies, suitable jobs etc? Very much appreciated

rdo2018 9y ago

This is helpful I am total neophyte when it comes to blockchain but its continued to surface in a number of conversation that seem credible- I need to launch a anonymous,but verified, de-centralized but coordinated way where users can contribute and consume with appropriate transaction costs- Blockchain seems to be an approach, as an underlying structure but I am concerned that its too hyped to be taken seriously and also seems to compete directly with other database approaches that today have computational scale issues but wont always due to low cost distributed technology- thoughts?