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Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

185 points by stablemap 8y ago

docdeek 8y ago
This seems like a cool, real-world use of the technology.
- Hendrikto 8y ago
  The problem is that people don’t see a problem and go looking for solutions. People see a technology and go looking for ways to apply it. Sure, a blockchain can be used to solve this problem. But should it? Probably not. It’s hard to find technical information but it seems like the same could have been accomplished with an easier solution.
- pweissbrod 8y ago
  welcome to the nosql of 2018
kapauldo 8y ago
This is a solution searching for a problem. Is a relational database really not sufficient for this?
s_kilk 8y ago
Will this idiotic mind-virus never die?
- dsr_ 8y ago
  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.
  - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
    >Or when all user interfaces were done in Flash? Or in JS.
StavrosK 8y ago
Why is a blockchain required for this? Why can't a single party keep this information?
- maxerickson 8y ago
  Probably for the marketing. The link to the actual description is behind a register wall, but there is a bunch of marketing gibberish at: https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food-trust https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food-trust There's no proof of work or similar and participants can limit who has access to the data they contribute, so it basically is just a data sharing system run by a central party.
- jcfrei 8y ago
  I think what blockchain refers to in this case is a database of transactions which can't be altered without participants noticing.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  It will be a single party keeping this information. That single party is IBM.
pertsix 8y ago
I guess they're using hyperledger?
- icebraining 8y ago
  Yeah, Hyperledger Fabric. https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food-trust#1225961 https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food-trust#1225961
Ua2Reemo 8y ago
What does a blockchain offer in this case that submitting a line to some sort of B2B logging API where the logs are made public (like certificate transparency) doesn't?
- koolba 8y ago
  The usage of the word “blockchain” in a marketing puff piece.
- lostmyoldone 8y ago
  Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but isn't it quite likely that it will primarily be used as leverage against suppliers? If the suppliers themselves enter every piece of information into what is essentially a living contract, any error or omission could be considered a breach of contract and can be leveraged. If it was only about food safety and increased sales because of increased trust the solution you propose, maybe with some kind of basic digital signatures, would be fine, and probably much cheaper. From what I've heard, Walmart seems to like moneh very much, hence doing something a more expensive way is likely to be intended to increase their bottom line in more ways than one.
- tomp 8y ago
  I don't get that either. Absent proof-of-work (which is however terribly energetically wasteful), blockchain is just a public GIT repository where every commit is signed, no?
  - pythonaut_16 8y ago
    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, <Farm A block>}[Signed by shipping agent] => {Received lettuce on data, <Shipping agent block>}[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?
wyldfire 8y ago
Decentralized? No, it's "IBM Food Trust". So how is this any better or different from hosting a database on IBM's server? Secured by a PoW? Doubt it. Here's the closest I could find to technical info: > IBM Food Trust's blockchain solution, on the other hand, is permissioned so invited members know exactly with whom they are transacting, similar to what happens between business partners today. Participants also determine what data is seen by whom, thereby providing information on a need-to-know basis. Smart contracts also run on our blockchain, allowing business logic to help solve disputes, automatically execute contracts, and build trust.
- imhoguy 8y ago
  Sounds like another buzzword charged write-once database.
  - muthdra 8y ago
    "buzzword charged" is a great expression.
  - ruiquelhas 8y ago
    Is it really write-once though? I'm pretty sure there's no PoW involved (didn't bother to read) so all bets are off.
    - rocqua 8y ago
      You can replace PoW by a simple signatures, or a quorum of signatures. This is quite centralized, but still write-once. In any case, with a 'hash-linked-chain-of-blocks' attempted forks are really easy to prove.
      - ruiquelhas 8y ago
        I get that, but there are no guarantees it is write-once, because it might happen that the "quorum of signatures" changes their mind.
- 8y ago
itissid 8y ago
Can't one solve the problem of tracking food contamination with a simple key value store that tracks supplier id and the food batch information? Whats the advantage of using blockchain here?
- bitL 8y ago
  It's about tracking all steps, all parts that were used, whether all companies involved in the processing chain had appropriate ISO certificates, if sourcing didn't originate from sanctioned countries or countries with bad working practices etc. in order to "select" ones that fulfill given criteria, possibly marketing them in multiple layers with certificates (this one is pure Swiss, cows were fed grass 100% from Glarus canton, operated 100% German machinery, food assembled by a Dutch factory implementing ISO blahblah, so here you pay 175% price; or you can get a budget version containing traces of ground fingers of children from Uganda forced to work in a processing factory with high contamination of environment etc.)
  - undersuit 8y ago
    Yes but how does a blockchain do anything that a database doesn't in this instance?
carbocation 8y ago
Walmart requires lettuce, spinach suppliers to submit information to a database.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  Your version does not have the same punch as the buzzwordful headline.
- vuln 8y ago
  Not clickbait enough. Need to get that ad revenue.
absurdum 8y ago
Unnecessary rubbish. The article even mentions that larger growers already have a similar(one can assume non-blockchain) system in place. This is the product of excited executives listening to buzzwords and the always shameless IBM ready to play along.
- MrEfficiency 8y ago
  Glad I asked these questions in Feburary. Sold my alts, kept my Bitcoin. Im seriously starting to believe in the phrase Bitcoin not Blockchain.
  - rocqua 8y ago
    Monero, zCash, Ether and EOS all do things bitcoin can't and are still decentralized.
code4tee 8y ago
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 track where your produce came from. This is just a marketing play through and though.
- SkyPuncher 8y ago
  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.
  - carbocation 8y ago
    > 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.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - the_jeremy 8y ago
      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.
  - bayesian_horse 8y ago
    The very point is that you can't tag the plant from the original producer to the individual consumer all the time. For one thing, you'd need to collect a whole lot of tags and carry them on. That would be the traditional solution. The blockchains record transactions. Where for example a batch of soy beans and a batch of wheat go into a batch of animal feed. Then a few batches of animal feed go into a pig (or rather multiple pigs). Then the individual piggy goes to the market. To trace back your food you need to know how the sausage is made, and trace back the transactions to find out where any particular problem is coming from. Point is: There is useful information even if certain steps can't be perfectly traced. There is value in not having to connect to a central database all the time.
tomhoward 8y ago
Archived/paywall-free version: http://archive.is/RSoqh http://archive.is/RSoqh
muthdra 8y ago
(Image) Do I need a blockchain? https://i1.wp.com/potdar.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/image_e8795092-8d69-408a-ac77-3fcdce87ca5e20180721_1650214228857716902582941.jpg https://i1.wp.com/potdar.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ima...
- LambdaComplex 8y ago
  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."
  - hazz99 8y ago
    Yeah, that's a dumb slide. It's true that most people don't need a blockchain, but most is not all.
perfunctory 8y ago
I can only imagine how terrible it must have felt to work on this project as an engineer. So your manager tells you 'ok, we are gonna make distributed, blockchain enabled, smart contracts based system" and then you end up building your run-of-the-mill centralized database app. It really saddens me that we have to put up with this kind of BS to just make a living.
x2398dh1 8y ago
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.
viach 8y ago
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.
kelvin0 8y ago
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' ....
hallihax 8y ago
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.
ethbro 8y ago
Does WSJ have an editing staff? The copy reads like it was written by a bored intern.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
We need a block chain in the fridge to know who ate what.
adamb01 8y ago
Without focusing on the relevance of whether Blockchain is required in this situation, the thing that I find interesting is that this is Walmart and this news source is the WSJ. That means executives from the world's largest companies are all reading this article and many will be having discussions with their management teams about blockchain. Technology relevance discussions aside, moves like this are what turn fads and buzzwords into funded projects and business models. And when a big company like Walmart makes a move like this, others follow ...
kown223 8y ago
the comments here remind of the dropbox thread as well, people here can be so shortsighted.
zer0faith 8y ago
This just goes to show how ignorant people can be when trying to solve problems with technology.
apo 8y ago
Notice how this article never clearly states specifically how a block chain solves the supply chain problem, nor does it even clearly state the problem in the first place. A very common response to these block chain/supply chain stories is that "a block chain is just a database." But even that statement is overly optimistic. A block chain is a log file. It keeps a record of a sequence of state changes. All of the tamper-resistant properties we associate with Bitcoin come, not from the log file it uses, but from the economic incentives around changing the file. So the choice isn't between a block chain and a database for these non-economically incentivized use cases such as IBM's supply chain projects. Rather, the choice is between a block chain and a dumb log file.
- rstuart4133 8y ago
  > Notice how this article never clearly states specifically how a block chain solves the supply chain problem Oh, I noticed. In fact it's the first thing I go looking for in these articles about "blockchain solves problem X". And then I read the words "IBM Hyperledger". I've tried to find out what Hyperledger is, but penetrating IBM's blizzard of marketing bullshit about it has so far proved beyond me. All I know it has some relationship to a think called a "permissioned blockchain". From what I can gather (as it is also surrounded by a cloud of marketing hype) a permissioned blockchain doesn't use proof of work, proof of stake or anything related. Nor is there a race to append the block. (Thus is it prompted as solving bitcoin's energy "problem", and because it doesn't need time to accumulate the proof of work it's not limited in the number of transactions it can process). Instead a permissioned blockchain appoints (ie, gives permission to) some miners to process the blocks. I have no idea what happens next, but I'm guessing in practice there is only one miner who checks the incoming transactions and assembles then into a block, signs the block using a public key, and publishes it by appending it to the database where it remains unchanged forever more. To me the word blockchain doesn't just mean "append only published database". If that was true every log file would qualify as a blockchain. It also involves a clever set of rules for appending to that database that have one clear goal: they ensure the log is append only by making alterations computationally expensive. In doing that a blockchain makes the "trust" quantifiable, eg to rewrite an entry 24 hours old in the log you are going to have to expend roughly 100 G Watt hours. Then by using more magic (the consistency checks aren't just rules, they are computer programs that can include assertions on future events, and thus control what happens in the future), the assertions can extended into "I promise to do X in the future, and if I don't I loose Y", and the only way to undo that promise is to expend that 100 G Watt hours. A permissioned blockchain shares none of those properties, so to me it isn't a blockchain name notwithstanding. What it does look like is the old fashioned titles office - if I want to transfer my house title I have to give a notice to the Titles Office, and when they give it their official stamp of approval and append it to their records, and it's done. In that case the currency is property, the transactions are record of change of ownership of that property (which always originate with the state owning the land), the blockchain database is the records of all changes of ownership (which happens to be public in this case), the single miner is the Titles Office. The amount of trust you have in the system boils down to much you trust the Titles Office to do its job (are they easily fooled, can someone be bribed, could a fire destroy the chain, and so on). This is not easily quantifiable. As an example I live in Australia whose civil systems are about as strong as you can get, yet every few years we have a new headline of someones house being sold from under them (usually while they were on an extended overseas holiday) due to title fraud. There is no recourse when this happens - the transaction is as irreversible as a bitcoin transaction and the state have legislated to ensure they are not responsible for any losses. However unlike bitcoin, it's impossible to extend the trust you put in the Titles Office to other applications. Or to put it another way: they are not going to look after your Ethereum ICO's for you, whereas Ethereum could do a very good job of looking after titles. So it isn't a blockchain. It looks to me like IBM is selling "Titles Office" software for other applications, given it the fancy name "Hyperledger" and added blockchain to marketing blurb for extra pizzazz. 10 points for marketing prowess I guess. It does however sound like a reasonable way to track food supplies. The currency is the food with some certifications. The transaction are changes of ownership, the miner is someone appointed to collects the sad transactions, stamp them as official, and append them to the log, the database is public so everyone (including the state and consumers) can verify everyone has made the right promises on that strawberry they are eating so they can sue there arses off if it contains needles. And the entity doing the certification (IBM?) gets to make a bit of money for their efforts.
theamk 8y ago
I think it is important to remember this is not any blockchain, it is IBM Blockchain For Business. I found a great overview page: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2017/05/the-difference-between-bitcoin-and-blockchain-for-business/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2017/05/the-difference-... > Consensus in a blockchain for business is not achieved through mining but through a process called “selective endorsement.” It is about being able to control exactly who verifies transactions, much in the same way that business happens today. [...] This is different from Bitcoin, where the whole network has to work to verify transactions. > Bitcoin thrives due to anonymity. [...] On the other hand, businesses have KYC (know your customer) and AML (anti-money laundering) compliance requirements that require them to know exactly who they are dealing with. Participants in business networks require the polar opposite of anonymity: privacy. So I actually think this is not such a bad idea. I mean, it allows IBM to take all the money from people who want to buy blockchain, but does not produce negative effects, like energy waste. Sure, I would call it "distributed event sourcing database", but if it has to be renamed for marketing reasons, this is OK too.
peterwwillis 8y ago
Alternate solution: do not announce small foodbourne illness outbreaks. In the article's example, 250 people got sick from a lettuce outbreak, and everyone stopped buying lettuce, hitting the whole industry. But 5 million people get sick from Norovirus alone in the US every year. Leafy vegetables like lettuce are the most common source of food illness. Telling people about a minor outbreak is just letting them freak out for no good reason. We should be educating people better about foodbourne illness so they can respond without freaking out, and so they don't get sick so damn much. And the media should stop freaking people out. 250 people out of 350 million getting sick, and not even dying? It's a minor risk! 35,000 die in traffic every year, and these people are freaked out by some lettuce. Take a fuckin chance, would ya please? https://youtu.be/X29lF43mUlo https://youtu.be/X29lF43mUlo
- komali2 8y ago
  Wouldn't it be necessary to know the number of people eating lettuce for this argument to hold weight? For example, I could argue so few people were affected because not many were eating lettuce, and then when news broke, nobody was eating lettuce. I know more people that drive cars than eat lettuce.
- prepend 8y ago
  The reason only 250 get sick is because of the notification. Traffic accidents aren’t contagious. Comparing a static risk and a dynamic risk is inappropriate. If lettuce is contaminated with ecoli at the source and you don’t recall/stop people eating it, you will have much more adverse health events. Different outbreaks have different responses and sometimes that includes notifying the at risk population and the source of the risk. [0] (this list includes lots of norovirus outbreaks and the response for them) We should also be educating people about food borne illness, but this isn’t exclusive to outbreak control. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/outbreaks/multistate-outbreaks/outbreaks-list.html https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/outbreaks/multistate-outbreak...
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    Let's compare the same things, then. 73 million Americans are infected with E.coli every year and 5,000 die. Only 5 died in this outbreak. You think that number was significantly reduced because it was announced that there was a single small outbreak? The outbreak was minor, but the effect on the economy and people's state of mind was overwhelmingly more powerful. It's fine to notify an at risk population if you can, but what do you gain if just a few less people get sick? What do you lose when people stop supporting an entire industry?
mathattack 8y ago
I’m surprised that Walmart is wasting time on this. They are both cheap, and very good with traditional databases.
DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
"As a tech person, the word 'blockchaing' is triggering, but the real story here is IBM and WalMart moving more surveillance and monitoring further down the food supply chain, to squeeze more out of farmers at the expense of everyone but them" https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1044926267521486848 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1044926267521486848
JoshuaAshton 8y ago
There is no reason for a blockchain here. A database would suffice just fine. It's not even decentralized so what's the point?
paulsutter 8y ago
There are two reasons to use a blockchain: to avoid double spending in an adversarial environment, and to avoid central control of a database. This application requires neither, and this implementation accomplishes neither.
- pimlottc 8y ago
  I'm aware of the latter justification, but can you elaborate further how a blockchain is more effective at preventing double spending than a centralized system?
  - paulsutter 8y ago
    An adversarial environment kinda rules out control by one of the adversaries (ie, whoever is running the centralized system)
schiffern 8y ago
Make no mistake -- this is nothing but a minimally-cloaked attack on federal food safety regulations. The word "blockchain" is only a distraction / misdirection. FTA: > Tests... have produced a more complete view of the food system than under current federal regulations, according to Nestlé SA, Dole Food Co., and other participants in the project. ["more complete" != "more accurate/accountable"] > As investigators worked , 210 people got sick and five died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [implying blame lies with the regulatory body, not the industry] > A directive for suppliers to use the Food Trust blockchain will help the industry create a more complete picture of the food system than is possible under current federal regulations, Mr. Yiannas said in an interview. [yet again federal regs are mentioned] > “Today, the requirement for traceability by law is one step up and one step back. That doesn’t work any more,” he said. [really obvious here!] > Early this year, as investigators worked to understand an outbreak of E. coli linked to romaine lettuce grown in the region of Yuma, Ariz., 210 people in 36 states got sick. Five people died, according to the Centers for Disease Control. [ditto blame shifting] > Blockchain establishes authorship or ownership that experts say can’t be faked and eliminates costly middle layers because of its peer-to-peer structure. [if it can't be faked, obviously there's no need for regulators! Garbage in, perfection out! ::eyeroll::] It's like claiming that ledgers written in pen make the SEC obsolete.
dnautics 8y ago
Can someone explain why you would want to use a block chain here and not just a "database"?
tCfD 8y ago
Of course this was bound to happen, the entire point of a blockchain is supposed to be that joining it is voluntary based on a set of shared values that you wish to support by contributing resources to sustain the blockchain. Forcing someone to join the blockchain is nothing less than forcing them into a commercial racket, and completely renders irrelevant the fundamental value proposition of decentralization.
ramoz 8y ago
had some thoughts: https://twitter.com/rambossa/status/1044975293109358592 https://twitter.com/rambossa/status/1044975293109358592
arcticbull 8y ago
I feel like I’m yelling into the wind, the only time a blockchain is it all relevant is if you cannot trust a single party. You can trust IBM in this case, and are, which makes this just a database but harder.
kristjansson 8y ago
We lack a good hash function for lettuce that allows one to eat it afterwards. This will limit the efficacy of blockchains in the supply chain space, but perhaps not their adoption...

185 points by stablemap 8y ago

docdeek 8y ago

This seems like a cool, real-world use of the technology.

Hendrikto 8y ago
The problem is that people don’t see a problem and go looking for solutions. People see a technology and go looking for ways to apply it. Sure, a blockchain can be used to solve this problem. But should it? Probably not. It’s hard to find technical information but it seems like the same could have been accomplished with an easier solution.
pweissbrod 8y ago
welcome to the nosql of 2018

kapauldo 8y ago

This is a solution searching for a problem. Is a relational database really not sufficient for this?

s_kilk 8y ago

Will this idiotic mind-virus never die?

dsr_ 8y ago
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.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  >Or when all user interfaces were done in Flash? Or in JS.

StavrosK 8y ago

Why is a blockchain required for this? Why can't a single party keep this information?

maxerickson 8y ago
Probably for the marketing. The link to the actual description is behind a register wall, but there is a bunch of marketing gibberish at: https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food-trust https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food-trust There's no proof of work or similar and participants can limit who has access to the data they contribute, so it basically is just a data sharing system run by a central party.
jcfrei 8y ago
I think what blockchain refers to in this case is a database of transactions which can't be altered without participants noticing.
aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
It will be a single party keeping this information. That single party is IBM.

pertsix 8y ago

I guess they're using hyperledger?

icebraining 8y ago
Yeah, Hyperledger Fabric. https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food-trust#1225961 https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food-trust#1225961

Ua2Reemo 8y ago

What does a blockchain offer in this case that submitting a line to some sort of B2B logging API where the logs are made public (like certificate transparency) doesn't?

koolba 8y ago
The usage of the word “blockchain” in a marketing puff piece.
lostmyoldone 8y ago
Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but isn't it quite likely that it will primarily be used as leverage against suppliers? If the suppliers themselves enter every piece of information into what is essentially a living contract, any error or omission could be considered a breach of contract and can be leveraged. If it was only about food safety and increased sales because of increased trust the solution you propose, maybe with some kind of basic digital signatures, would be fine, and probably much cheaper. From what I've heard, Walmart seems to like moneh very much, hence doing something a more expensive way is likely to be intended to increase their bottom line in more ways than one.
tomp 8y ago
I don't get that either. Absent proof-of-work (which is however terribly energetically wasteful), blockchain is just a public GIT repository where every commit is signed, no?
- pythonaut_16 8y ago
  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, <Farm A block>}[Signed by shipping agent] => {Received lettuce on data, <Shipping agent block>}[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?

wyldfire 8y ago

Decentralized? No, it's "IBM Food Trust". So how is this any better or different from hosting a database on IBM's server? Secured by a PoW? Doubt it. Here's the closest I could find to technical info: > IBM Food Trust's blockchain solution, on the other hand, is permissioned so invited members know exactly with whom they are transacting, similar to what happens between business partners today. Participants also determine what data is seen by whom, thereby providing information on a need-to-know basis. Smart contracts also run on our blockchain, allowing business logic to help solve disputes, automatically execute contracts, and build trust.

imhoguy 8y ago
Sounds like another buzzword charged write-once database.
- muthdra 8y ago
  "buzzword charged" is a great expression.
- ruiquelhas 8y ago
  Is it really write-once though? I'm pretty sure there's no PoW involved (didn't bother to read) so all bets are off.
  - rocqua 8y ago
    You can replace PoW by a simple signatures, or a quorum of signatures. This is quite centralized, but still write-once. In any case, with a 'hash-linked-chain-of-blocks' attempted forks are really easy to prove.
    - ruiquelhas 8y ago
      I get that, but there are no guarantees it is write-once, because it might happen that the "quorum of signatures" changes their mind.
8y ago

itissid 8y ago

Can't one solve the problem of tracking food contamination with a simple key value store that tracks supplier id and the food batch information? Whats the advantage of using blockchain here?

bitL 8y ago
It's about tracking all steps, all parts that were used, whether all companies involved in the processing chain had appropriate ISO certificates, if sourcing didn't originate from sanctioned countries or countries with bad working practices etc. in order to "select" ones that fulfill given criteria, possibly marketing them in multiple layers with certificates (this one is pure Swiss, cows were fed grass 100% from Glarus canton, operated 100% German machinery, food assembled by a Dutch factory implementing ISO blahblah, so here you pay 175% price; or you can get a budget version containing traces of ground fingers of children from Uganda forced to work in a processing factory with high contamination of environment etc.)
- undersuit 8y ago
  Yes but how does a blockchain do anything that a database doesn't in this instance?

carbocation 8y ago

Walmart requires lettuce, spinach suppliers to submit information to a database.

ekianjo 8y ago
Your version does not have the same punch as the buzzwordful headline.
vuln 8y ago
Not clickbait enough. Need to get that ad revenue.

absurdum 8y ago

Unnecessary rubbish. The article even mentions that larger growers already have a similar(one can assume non-blockchain) system in place. This is the product of excited executives listening to buzzwords and the always shameless IBM ready to play along.

MrEfficiency 8y ago
Glad I asked these questions in Feburary. Sold my alts, kept my Bitcoin. Im seriously starting to believe in the phrase Bitcoin not Blockchain.
- rocqua 8y ago
  Monero, zCash, Ether and EOS all do things bitcoin can't and are still decentralized.

code4tee 8y ago

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 track where your produce came from. This is just a marketing play through and though.

SkyPuncher 8y ago
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.
- carbocation 8y ago
  > 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.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - the_jeremy 8y ago
    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.
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  The very point is that you can't tag the plant from the original producer to the individual consumer all the time. For one thing, you'd need to collect a whole lot of tags and carry them on. That would be the traditional solution. The blockchains record transactions. Where for example a batch of soy beans and a batch of wheat go into a batch of animal feed. Then a few batches of animal feed go into a pig (or rather multiple pigs). Then the individual piggy goes to the market. To trace back your food you need to know how the sausage is made, and trace back the transactions to find out where any particular problem is coming from. Point is: There is useful information even if certain steps can't be perfectly traced. There is value in not having to connect to a central database all the time.

tomhoward 8y ago

Archived/paywall-free version: http://archive.is/RSoqh http://archive.is/RSoqh

muthdra 8y ago

(Image) Do I need a blockchain? https://i1.wp.com/potdar.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/image_e8795092-8d69-408a-ac77-3fcdce87ca5e20180721_1650214228857716902582941.jpg https://i1.wp.com/potdar.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ima...

LambdaComplex 8y ago
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."
- hazz99 8y ago
  Yeah, that's a dumb slide. It's true that most people don't need a blockchain, but most is not all.

perfunctory 8y ago

I can only imagine how terrible it must have felt to work on this project as an engineer. So your manager tells you 'ok, we are gonna make distributed, blockchain enabled, smart contracts based system" and then you end up building your run-of-the-mill centralized database app. It really saddens me that we have to put up with this kind of BS to just make a living.

x2398dh1 8y ago

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.

viach 8y ago

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.

kelvin0 8y ago

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' ....

hallihax 8y ago

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.

ethbro 8y ago

Does WSJ have an editing staff? The copy reads like it was written by a bored intern.

bayesian_horse 8y ago

We need a block chain in the fridge to know who ate what.

adamb01 8y ago

Without focusing on the relevance of whether Blockchain is required in this situation, the thing that I find interesting is that this is Walmart and this news source is the WSJ. That means executives from the world's largest companies are all reading this article and many will be having discussions with their management teams about blockchain. Technology relevance discussions aside, moves like this are what turn fads and buzzwords into funded projects and business models. And when a big company like Walmart makes a move like this, others follow ...

kown223 8y ago

the comments here remind of the dropbox thread as well, people here can be so shortsighted.

zer0faith 8y ago

This just goes to show how ignorant people can be when trying to solve problems with technology.

apo 8y ago

Notice how this article never clearly states specifically how a block chain solves the supply chain problem, nor does it even clearly state the problem in the first place. A very common response to these block chain/supply chain stories is that "a block chain is just a database." But even that statement is overly optimistic. A block chain is a log file. It keeps a record of a sequence of state changes. All of the tamper-resistant properties we associate with Bitcoin come, not from the log file it uses, but from the economic incentives around changing the file. So the choice isn't between a block chain and a database for these non-economically incentivized use cases such as IBM's supply chain projects. Rather, the choice is between a block chain and a dumb log file.

rstuart4133 8y ago
> Notice how this article never clearly states specifically how a block chain solves the supply chain problem Oh, I noticed. In fact it's the first thing I go looking for in these articles about "blockchain solves problem X". And then I read the words "IBM Hyperledger". I've tried to find out what Hyperledger is, but penetrating IBM's blizzard of marketing bullshit about it has so far proved beyond me. All I know it has some relationship to a think called a "permissioned blockchain". From what I can gather (as it is also surrounded by a cloud of marketing hype) a permissioned blockchain doesn't use proof of work, proof of stake or anything related. Nor is there a race to append the block. (Thus is it prompted as solving bitcoin's energy "problem", and because it doesn't need time to accumulate the proof of work it's not limited in the number of transactions it can process). Instead a permissioned blockchain appoints (ie, gives permission to) some miners to process the blocks. I have no idea what happens next, but I'm guessing in practice there is only one miner who checks the incoming transactions and assembles then into a block, signs the block using a public key, and publishes it by appending it to the database where it remains unchanged forever more. To me the word blockchain doesn't just mean "append only published database". If that was true every log file would qualify as a blockchain. It also involves a clever set of rules for appending to that database that have one clear goal: they ensure the log is append only by making alterations computationally expensive. In doing that a blockchain makes the "trust" quantifiable, eg to rewrite an entry 24 hours old in the log you are going to have to expend roughly 100 G Watt hours. Then by using more magic (the consistency checks aren't just rules, they are computer programs that can include assertions on future events, and thus control what happens in the future), the assertions can extended into "I promise to do X in the future, and if I don't I loose Y", and the only way to undo that promise is to expend that 100 G Watt hours. A permissioned blockchain shares none of those properties, so to me it isn't a blockchain name notwithstanding. What it does look like is the old fashioned titles office - if I want to transfer my house title I have to give a notice to the Titles Office, and when they give it their official stamp of approval and append it to their records, and it's done. In that case the currency is property, the transactions are record of change of ownership of that property (which always originate with the state owning the land), the blockchain database is the records of all changes of ownership (which happens to be public in this case), the single miner is the Titles Office. The amount of trust you have in the system boils down to much you trust the Titles Office to do its job (are they easily fooled, can someone be bribed, could a fire destroy the chain, and so on). This is not easily quantifiable. As an example I live in Australia whose civil systems are about as strong as you can get, yet every few years we have a new headline of someones house being sold from under them (usually while they were on an extended overseas holiday) due to title fraud. There is no recourse when this happens - the transaction is as irreversible as a bitcoin transaction and the state have legislated to ensure they are not responsible for any losses. However unlike bitcoin, it's impossible to extend the trust you put in the Titles Office to other applications. Or to put it another way: they are not going to look after your Ethereum ICO's for you, whereas Ethereum could do a very good job of looking after titles. So it isn't a blockchain. It looks to me like IBM is selling "Titles Office" software for other applications, given it the fancy name "Hyperledger" and added blockchain to marketing blurb for extra pizzazz. 10 points for marketing prowess I guess. It does however sound like a reasonable way to track food supplies. The currency is the food with some certifications. The transaction are changes of ownership, the miner is someone appointed to collects the sad transactions, stamp them as official, and append them to the log, the database is public so everyone (including the state and consumers) can verify everyone has made the right promises on that strawberry they are eating so they can sue there arses off if it contains needles. And the entity doing the certification (IBM?) gets to make a bit of money for their efforts.

theamk 8y ago

I think it is important to remember this is not any blockchain, it is IBM Blockchain For Business. I found a great overview page: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2017/05/the-difference-between-bitcoin-and-blockchain-for-business/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2017/05/the-difference-... > Consensus in a blockchain for business is not achieved through mining but through a process called “selective endorsement.” It is about being able to control exactly who verifies transactions, much in the same way that business happens today. [...] This is different from Bitcoin, where the whole network has to work to verify transactions. > Bitcoin thrives due to anonymity. [...] On the other hand, businesses have KYC (know your customer) and AML (anti-money laundering) compliance requirements that require them to know exactly who they are dealing with. Participants in business networks require the polar opposite of anonymity: privacy. So I actually think this is not such a bad idea. I mean, it allows IBM to take all the money from people who want to buy blockchain, but does not produce negative effects, like energy waste. Sure, I would call it "distributed event sourcing database", but if it has to be renamed for marketing reasons, this is OK too.

peterwwillis 8y ago

Alternate solution: do not announce small foodbourne illness outbreaks. In the article's example, 250 people got sick from a lettuce outbreak, and everyone stopped buying lettuce, hitting the whole industry. But 5 million people get sick from Norovirus alone in the US every year. Leafy vegetables like lettuce are the most common source of food illness. Telling people about a minor outbreak is just letting them freak out for no good reason. We should be educating people better about foodbourne illness so they can respond without freaking out, and so they don't get sick so damn much. And the media should stop freaking people out. 250 people out of 350 million getting sick, and not even dying? It's a minor risk! 35,000 die in traffic every year, and these people are freaked out by some lettuce. Take a fuckin chance, would ya please? https://youtu.be/X29lF43mUlo https://youtu.be/X29lF43mUlo

komali2 8y ago
Wouldn't it be necessary to know the number of people eating lettuce for this argument to hold weight? For example, I could argue so few people were affected because not many were eating lettuce, and then when news broke, nobody was eating lettuce. I know more people that drive cars than eat lettuce.
prepend 8y ago
The reason only 250 get sick is because of the notification. Traffic accidents aren’t contagious. Comparing a static risk and a dynamic risk is inappropriate. If lettuce is contaminated with ecoli at the source and you don’t recall/stop people eating it, you will have much more adverse health events. Different outbreaks have different responses and sometimes that includes notifying the at risk population and the source of the risk. [0] (this list includes lots of norovirus outbreaks and the response for them) We should also be educating people about food borne illness, but this isn’t exclusive to outbreak control. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/outbreaks/multistate-outbreaks/outbreaks-list.html https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/outbreaks/multistate-outbreak...
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  Let's compare the same things, then. 73 million Americans are infected with E.coli every year and 5,000 die. Only 5 died in this outbreak. You think that number was significantly reduced because it was announced that there was a single small outbreak? The outbreak was minor, but the effect on the economy and people's state of mind was overwhelmingly more powerful. It's fine to notify an at risk population if you can, but what do you gain if just a few less people get sick? What do you lose when people stop supporting an entire industry?

mathattack 8y ago

I’m surprised that Walmart is wasting time on this. They are both cheap, and very good with traditional databases.

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago

"As a tech person, the word 'blockchaing' is triggering, but the real story here is IBM and WalMart moving more surveillance and monitoring further down the food supply chain, to squeeze more out of farmers at the expense of everyone but them" https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1044926267521486848 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1044926267521486848

JoshuaAshton 8y ago

There is no reason for a blockchain here. A database would suffice just fine. It's not even decentralized so what's the point?

paulsutter 8y ago

There are two reasons to use a blockchain: to avoid double spending in an adversarial environment, and to avoid central control of a database. This application requires neither, and this implementation accomplishes neither.

pimlottc 8y ago
I'm aware of the latter justification, but can you elaborate further how a blockchain is more effective at preventing double spending than a centralized system?
- paulsutter 8y ago
  An adversarial environment kinda rules out control by one of the adversaries (ie, whoever is running the centralized system)

schiffern 8y ago

Make no mistake -- this is nothing but a minimally-cloaked attack on federal food safety regulations. The word "blockchain" is only a distraction / misdirection. FTA: > Tests... have produced a more complete view of the food system than under current federal regulations, according to Nestlé SA, Dole Food Co., and other participants in the project. ["more complete" != "more accurate/accountable"] > As investigators worked , 210 people got sick and five died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [implying blame lies with the regulatory body, not the industry] > A directive for suppliers to use the Food Trust blockchain will help the industry create a more complete picture of the food system than is possible under current federal regulations, Mr. Yiannas said in an interview. [yet again federal regs are mentioned] > “Today, the requirement for traceability by law is one step up and one step back. That doesn’t work any more,” he said. [really obvious here!] > Early this year, as investigators worked to understand an outbreak of E. coli linked to romaine lettuce grown in the region of Yuma, Ariz., 210 people in 36 states got sick. Five people died, according to the Centers for Disease Control. [ditto blame shifting] > Blockchain establishes authorship or ownership that experts say can’t be faked and eliminates costly middle layers because of its peer-to-peer structure. [if it can't be faked, obviously there's no need for regulators! Garbage in, perfection out! ::eyeroll::] It's like claiming that ledgers written in pen make the SEC obsolete.

dnautics 8y ago

Can someone explain why you would want to use a block chain here and not just a "database"?

tCfD 8y ago

Of course this was bound to happen, the entire point of a blockchain is supposed to be that joining it is voluntary based on a set of shared values that you wish to support by contributing resources to sustain the blockchain. Forcing someone to join the blockchain is nothing less than forcing them into a commercial racket, and completely renders irrelevant the fundamental value proposition of decentralization.

ramoz 8y ago

had some thoughts: https://twitter.com/rambossa/status/1044975293109358592 https://twitter.com/rambossa/status/1044975293109358592

arcticbull 8y ago

I feel like I’m yelling into the wind, the only time a blockchain is it all relevant is if you cannot trust a single party. You can trust IBM in this case, and are, which makes this just a database but harder.

kristjansson 8y ago

We lack a good hash function for lettuce that allows one to eat it afterwards. This will limit the efficacy of blockchains in the supply chain space, but perhaps not their adoption...