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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 market

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.
  - SkyPuncher 8y ago
    > Point is: There is useful information even if certain steps can't be perfectly traced. Yes (and no), but that's not what IBM is selling with their blockchain. They're selling trust, but only providing a digital trust solution while completely ignoring the physical and human side of trust. > There is value in not having to connect to a central database all the time. Problem here is IBM's blockchain is still a centrally maintained database. This literally provides any value. You still need to connect to a central database at some point.
    - bayesian_horse 8y ago
      "At some point" is not the same as "eventually". Think of it as "eventually consistent" to the extreme.
maratd 8y ago
> 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.
- code4tee 8y ago
  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.”
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    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.
    - simias 8y ago
      > If the article was talking about Walmart using PKI with business partners, this thread would be grousing about how dumb CAs are. Would we? That seems like a perfectly reasonable solution to me. You have a clear central authority here who could be issuing certificates to trusted third parties. It's a perfect fit for a CA and a bad fit for a blockchain.
      - Spooky23 8y ago
        The PKI model is awesome for less dynamic environments. Factories and suppliers are a great example of that. Produce is more dynamic and 100% cost driven. You have multiple, unsophisticated suppliers that shift based on season, weather, etc. These folks are located in the middle of nowhere in many cases and may or may not have connectivity. Carting the produce from these suppliers to distribution is performed by any number of trucking companies. Then you have the huge distributed enterprise of WalMart itself, with dozens/hundreds of DCs and an internal fleet of trucks and contractors who cart products to the store. Bitcoin demonstrated that a large number of unknown parties can successfully store and transfer value. I don't see why this would be a bad fit.
qubax 8y ago
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.
- booleandilemma 8y ago
  It’s all about NewSql now. The cool kids recently figured out ACID is important after all.
- henvic 8y ago
  The playground is all about running critical systems with databases that are ACID compliance for the past two months, instead of 23 years. After all, obviously you need webscale, and something that is working successfully in the industry for so long must be outdated by now as structured data is antiquated by definition (even though immutability sounds cool). lol
technofiend 8y ago
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.
- hellogoodbyeeee 8y ago
  I don't think so. I think the actual headline (after IBM's pr machine gets involved) will be, "IBM successfully limits spinach e coli outbreak to only 56 people across seven states."
  - technofiend 8y ago
    Sir I believe you may be ignoring the penchant for clickbait journalism these days. I'm not saying it's fair but it's effective.
maccio92 8y ago
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.
- simias 8y ago
  >This specific instance grants assurance that neither Walmart or anyone in-between is tampering with the database. We've had this discussion a billion times before on HN so I'll avoid a huge wall of text but it always boils down to the same conclusion: blockchains (as in bitcoin) are about being completely decentralized and trustless. It's an "and" not an "or", if you remove one of these imperatives they're completely pointless. Detecting tampering can be achieved trivially using public key cryptography and a good hash function. So you're either saying that what IBM is doing is not a true blockchain or you're fine with anybody using PGP and sha256sum labeling their product as a blockchain. In the latter case it means that bittorent, linux package managers and Windows Updates qualify as "blockchains". At any rate this is obviously a huge marketing ploy to get free advertising, like "web 2.0" or "cloud computing" before. The problem here is that pumping the "blockchain technology" also means pumping the entire ecosystem of cryptocurrencies which is 90% scams at this point.
  - noxToken 8y ago
    > blockchains (as in bitcoin) are about being completely decentralized and trustless. It's an "and" not an "or", if you remove one of these imperatives they're completely pointless. You're completely right, but I want to point out something subtle that I almost missed. For something to be considered a blockchain, it does not have to be distributed (as you noted). There can be a centralized entity (Wal-Mart) controlling the blockchain, but like you said, a controlling entity takes away trust. Without trust, Wal-Mart can still verify any tampering, but the public would still have to trust that Wal-Mart is coming forward with any discrepancies.
    - 8y ago
api 8y ago
IBM is run by salespeople. This is what you get.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  Salespeople better know what problems a blockchain solves that could not be solved with previous methods. Because this is something that customers will ask.
  - drunken-serval 8y ago
    Not necessarily. The company I work for has a number of customers asking for blockchain but they don't know what it is. They just want it because it's the new cool thing and it will make them look up to date. The part of this that's hilarious is we already have verification mechanisms in place. We have logs, controlled access, and verification hashes. It would not be easy to bypass the controls we already have. On top of all of this, most of our customers can't even figure out how to read their emails to click a password reset link. If IBM wants to fleece people, more POWER to them.
duxup 8y ago
IBM really seems stuck in their old systems / and at some level doesn't understand what to do with new systems. I was talking to someone who was using the "IBM cloud". They went to spin up some servers and etc and IBM was all "that will take a few weeks, we have to install them". At least to me "cloud" includes the ability to spin stuff up on demand.... IBM was operating it like you were ordering from a very old co-location service or something. Word has it Watson failed possibly because it was sold as a magic drop in solution where in reality careful data entry and a lot of work was required to get quality results requiring both the customer and IBM to be heavily involved. Maybe had they understood / sold it right and brought the customer's along and tried it in the right places they would have done better.... or at least had a better chance. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how things work and thus how to sell / execute at IBM.
- 0898 8y ago
  Yes. They kind of claimed Watson would tell you the answer even if you didn’t even know the question.
  - gnu8 8y ago
    “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"
- Milner08 8y ago
  I hate to defend IBM (I used to work there and have nothing good to say) but its likely they were using the "Private Cloud" which is exactly what you say, co-location in the IBM Datacenter. Its just marketing rubbish.
  - module0000 8y ago
    "IBM Cloud Private" - it's a fascinating product that can be summed up as "We package kubernetes for you, and you pay us 2 million dollars. If you are a huge customer, we'll discount that to 1.6 million dollars." Trying to keep from maniacal laughing during their sales pitches is always a fun game.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
As I understand it, a blockchain is a decentralized database which does not require the individual instances to have perfect connectivity and perfect trust all the time. I can see why that would be something worth doing in a food chain. To trace, for example, a particular load of soy beans to a customer eating a steak, there are a couple of completely autonomous companies/sole proprietors involved. From the original soy farmer, through feed production (maybe multiple factories because the soy is processed and later mixed with other ingredients), feed distributors and transporters, to the cattle farm. Again the individual animal can change hands multiple times, for example a bull calf can be fed soy based milk exchangers at a dairy farm where it was born, then be sold to a farm that raises it to market (with pigs there can be three different farmers from piglet to market maturity), then to the slaughterhouse, the meat goes to food processors and then into a distribution channel. Easily a dozen or two separate legal entities. I can see why it could be hard to connect each of them to a central database reliably may be tricky.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  If those dozen or two separate legal entities can all hop on a blockchain, they can likely make a POST request to Walmart's API too, right?
  - bayesian_horse 8y ago
    Putting data into a blockchain is something different from making a TCP/IP connection to the internet. In a blockchain system, a particular piece of information has to eventually reach all interested parties, of course. But it can do so through a chain of potentially untrusted intermediaries, which also don't have to be connected through an internet connection. For example a truck servicing multiple farms or multiple stations on one farm, could collect new information packets, and pass on those he already has. Variations of the "Sneaker Net" pattern if you will. Food chain information is not very time-sensitive. A POST request is, however, very much time sensitive.
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      My phone's Instagram app lets me "publish" images without a data connection. It queues them up, then POSTs them off to Facebook's API once I'm back online. None of this requires - or even benefits from - a blockchain.
invalidusernam3 8y ago
Decentralized doesn't mean nobody is in control (Bitcoin devs are in control of Bitcoin), it means there isn't a central place where data is stored.
joshbaptiste 8y ago
Nope, a blockchain would serve a good purpose to have disparate entities share immutable data with event history, as today most companies are not giving each other access to their respective databases.
- arcticbull 8y ago
  So why doesn’t someone do that — or create a centralized Walmart database of food transactions hosted by IBM, like in a MySQL store with a CRUD front end. There I just saved everyone millions and tons of energy.
emodendroket 8y ago
What's amazing to me is that, in this case, that's completely obvious to anyone technical. Lots of people know only a little bit about AI, even if they're computer programmers; I think most people can appreciate the idea of a distributed database.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
whalesalad 8y ago
I’m glad to hear more people slicing through the bullshit on this. I’m building a company that aims to build a centralized and impartial means to trace food through the supply chain. Every time I pitch this to people the first thing they’ll do is cock their heads and say... “so is this going to be blockchain?!” and I have to explain in layman’s terms why that’s not necessary nor beneficial.
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
Does it matter ? Walmart is saying "jump" to 1,000 small suppliers, and next year they will say "jump" to 100,000 suppliers At some point other businesses will say "if a freaking lettuce grower is putting their supply chain on the blockchain, why the hell aren't we?" Somewhere there is a tipping point - and then logistics is done through dozens of "private" blockchains, which i will better is orders of magnitude simpler and more efficient than now.
TheColorYellow 8y ago
"There’s nothing being done here that couldn’t or shouldn’t just be handled with a traditional database." Okay, I'll bite. A few questions that I think lead to the idea of a DLT system being an appropriate fit: If it's a single
TheColorYellow 8y ago
Help me out here, I really don't see how a traditional database could solve the problem today. If you have various different, independent actors that operate in a shared environment but with distinct roles, how does traditional DBs help you do anything that isn't already being done today? For example, sharing data between those actors is still a heavy duty process. Trusting the data coming to you from other actors is still a high risk area, even if they aren't intentionally acting maliciously. Determining actors who have acted in poor faith without trusted and transparent data sources is incredibly difficult as well. How do you overcome these issues and come to the point of a centralized DB either? Who's going to own that central DB and pay for everything going into and out of it? So in that way, I don't see your point about how a traditional or central DB could solve these issues. I agree with all your other points, and I certainly agree the buzzword charm is heavy as always with this topic, but I don't buy that part. Happy to hear otherwise. Full transparency, to me, it does seem like DLT has an enterprise value so I'm a bit more of a homer than most.
- fragsworth 8y ago
  > sharing data between those actors is still a heavy duty process. Utter nonsense. Everything is HARDER TO DO when done through a blockchain. > Trusting the data coming to you from other actors is still a high risk area Utter nonsense. Public / private key encryption solves this in the same way a blockchain would, because a blockchain uses public / private key encryption. > Who's going to own that central DB and pay for everything going into and out of it? Walmart. Or IBM. It would likely cost less than $50/month of AWS resources, including backups and redundancy.
  - TheColorYellow 8y ago
    > Everything is HARDER TO DO when done through a blockchain Could you explain? PKI is solves the issue of identity. It can't solve all the issues around accuracy, consistency, and provenance when it comes to data sharing. Ignoring the idea that you think it's a cheap endeavor, my bigger point is that putting every single bit of the responsibility on a single entity is a tough challenge.

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.
- SkyPuncher 8y ago
  > Point is: There is useful information even if certain steps can't be perfectly traced. Yes (and no), but that's not what IBM is selling with their blockchain. They're selling trust, but only providing a digital trust solution while completely ignoring the physical and human side of trust. > There is value in not having to connect to a central database all the time. Problem here is IBM's blockchain is still a centrally maintained database. This literally provides any value. You still need to connect to a central database at some point.
  - bayesian_horse 8y ago
    "At some point" is not the same as "eventually". Think of it as "eventually consistent" to the extreme.

maratd 8y ago

> 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.

code4tee 8y ago
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.”
- Spooky23 8y ago
  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.
  - simias 8y ago
    > If the article was talking about Walmart using PKI with business partners, this thread would be grousing about how dumb CAs are. Would we? That seems like a perfectly reasonable solution to me. You have a clear central authority here who could be issuing certificates to trusted third parties. It's a perfect fit for a CA and a bad fit for a blockchain.
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      The PKI model is awesome for less dynamic environments. Factories and suppliers are a great example of that. Produce is more dynamic and 100% cost driven. You have multiple, unsophisticated suppliers that shift based on season, weather, etc. These folks are located in the middle of nowhere in many cases and may or may not have connectivity. Carting the produce from these suppliers to distribution is performed by any number of trucking companies. Then you have the huge distributed enterprise of WalMart itself, with dozens/hundreds of DCs and an internal fleet of trucks and contractors who cart products to the store. Bitcoin demonstrated that a large number of unknown parties can successfully store and transfer value. I don't see why this would be a bad fit.

qubax 8y ago

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.

booleandilemma 8y ago
It’s all about NewSql now. The cool kids recently figured out ACID is important after all.
henvic 8y ago
The playground is all about running critical systems with databases that are ACID compliance for the past two months, instead of 23 years. After all, obviously you need webscale, and something that is working successfully in the industry for so long must be outdated by now as structured data is antiquated by definition (even though immutability sounds cool). lol

technofiend 8y ago

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.

hellogoodbyeeee 8y ago
I don't think so. I think the actual headline (after IBM's pr machine gets involved) will be, "IBM successfully limits spinach e coli outbreak to only 56 people across seven states."
- technofiend 8y ago
  Sir I believe you may be ignoring the penchant for clickbait journalism these days. I'm not saying it's fair but it's effective.

maccio92 8y ago

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.

simias 8y ago
>This specific instance grants assurance that neither Walmart or anyone in-between is tampering with the database. We've had this discussion a billion times before on HN so I'll avoid a huge wall of text but it always boils down to the same conclusion: blockchains (as in bitcoin) are about being completely decentralized and trustless. It's an "and" not an "or", if you remove one of these imperatives they're completely pointless. Detecting tampering can be achieved trivially using public key cryptography and a good hash function. So you're either saying that what IBM is doing is not a true blockchain or you're fine with anybody using PGP and sha256sum labeling their product as a blockchain. In the latter case it means that bittorent, linux package managers and Windows Updates qualify as "blockchains". At any rate this is obviously a huge marketing ploy to get free advertising, like "web 2.0" or "cloud computing" before. The problem here is that pumping the "blockchain technology" also means pumping the entire ecosystem of cryptocurrencies which is 90% scams at this point.
- noxToken 8y ago
  > blockchains (as in bitcoin) are about being completely decentralized and trustless. It's an "and" not an "or", if you remove one of these imperatives they're completely pointless. You're completely right, but I want to point out something subtle that I almost missed. For something to be considered a blockchain, it does not have to be distributed (as you noted). There can be a centralized entity (Wal-Mart) controlling the blockchain, but like you said, a controlling entity takes away trust. Without trust, Wal-Mart can still verify any tampering, but the public would still have to trust that Wal-Mart is coming forward with any discrepancies.
  - 8y ago

api 8y ago

IBM is run by salespeople. This is what you get.

wolfgke 8y ago
Salespeople better know what problems a blockchain solves that could not be solved with previous methods. Because this is something that customers will ask.
- drunken-serval 8y ago
  Not necessarily. The company I work for has a number of customers asking for blockchain but they don't know what it is. They just want it because it's the new cool thing and it will make them look up to date. The part of this that's hilarious is we already have verification mechanisms in place. We have logs, controlled access, and verification hashes. It would not be easy to bypass the controls we already have. On top of all of this, most of our customers can't even figure out how to read their emails to click a password reset link. If IBM wants to fleece people, more POWER to them.

duxup 8y ago

IBM really seems stuck in their old systems / and at some level doesn't understand what to do with new systems. I was talking to someone who was using the "IBM cloud". They went to spin up some servers and etc and IBM was all "that will take a few weeks, we have to install them". At least to me "cloud" includes the ability to spin stuff up on demand.... IBM was operating it like you were ordering from a very old co-location service or something. Word has it Watson failed possibly because it was sold as a magic drop in solution where in reality careful data entry and a lot of work was required to get quality results requiring both the customer and IBM to be heavily involved. Maybe had they understood / sold it right and brought the customer's along and tried it in the right places they would have done better.... or at least had a better chance. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how things work and thus how to sell / execute at IBM.

0898 8y ago
Yes. They kind of claimed Watson would tell you the answer even if you didn’t even know the question.
- gnu8 8y ago
  “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"
Milner08 8y ago
I hate to defend IBM (I used to work there and have nothing good to say) but its likely they were using the "Private Cloud" which is exactly what you say, co-location in the IBM Datacenter. Its just marketing rubbish.
- module0000 8y ago
  "IBM Cloud Private" - it's a fascinating product that can be summed up as "We package kubernetes for you, and you pay us 2 million dollars. If you are a huge customer, we'll discount that to 1.6 million dollars." Trying to keep from maniacal laughing during their sales pitches is always a fun game.

bayesian_horse 8y ago

As I understand it, a blockchain is a decentralized database which does not require the individual instances to have perfect connectivity and perfect trust all the time. I can see why that would be something worth doing in a food chain. To trace, for example, a particular load of soy beans to a customer eating a steak, there are a couple of completely autonomous companies/sole proprietors involved. From the original soy farmer, through feed production (maybe multiple factories because the soy is processed and later mixed with other ingredients), feed distributors and transporters, to the cattle farm. Again the individual animal can change hands multiple times, for example a bull calf can be fed soy based milk exchangers at a dairy farm where it was born, then be sold to a farm that raises it to market (with pigs there can be three different farmers from piglet to market maturity), then to the slaughterhouse, the meat goes to food processors and then into a distribution channel. Easily a dozen or two separate legal entities. I can see why it could be hard to connect each of them to a central database reliably may be tricky.

ceejayoz 8y ago
If those dozen or two separate legal entities can all hop on a blockchain, they can likely make a POST request to Walmart's API too, right?
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  Putting data into a blockchain is something different from making a TCP/IP connection to the internet. In a blockchain system, a particular piece of information has to eventually reach all interested parties, of course. But it can do so through a chain of potentially untrusted intermediaries, which also don't have to be connected through an internet connection. For example a truck servicing multiple farms or multiple stations on one farm, could collect new information packets, and pass on those he already has. Variations of the "Sneaker Net" pattern if you will. Food chain information is not very time-sensitive. A POST request is, however, very much time sensitive.
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    My phone's Instagram app lets me "publish" images without a data connection. It queues them up, then POSTs them off to Facebook's API once I'm back online. None of this requires - or even benefits from - a blockchain.

invalidusernam3 8y ago

Decentralized doesn't mean nobody is in control (Bitcoin devs are in control of Bitcoin), it means there isn't a central place where data is stored.

joshbaptiste 8y ago

Nope, a blockchain would serve a good purpose to have disparate entities share immutable data with event history, as today most companies are not giving each other access to their respective databases.

arcticbull 8y ago
So why doesn’t someone do that — or create a centralized Walmart database of food transactions hosted by IBM, like in a MySQL store with a CRUD front end. There I just saved everyone millions and tons of energy.

emodendroket 8y ago

What's amazing to me is that, in this case, that's completely obvious to anyone technical. Lots of people know only a little bit about AI, even if they're computer programmers; I think most people can appreciate the idea of a distributed database.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

whalesalad 8y ago

I’m glad to hear more people slicing through the bullshit on this. I’m building a company that aims to build a centralized and impartial means to trace food through the supply chain. Every time I pitch this to people the first thing they’ll do is cock their heads and say... “so is this going to be blockchain?!” and I have to explain in layman’s terms why that’s not necessary nor beneficial.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

Does it matter ? Walmart is saying "jump" to 1,000 small suppliers, and next year they will say "jump" to 100,000 suppliers At some point other businesses will say "if a freaking lettuce grower is putting their supply chain on the blockchain, why the hell aren't we?" Somewhere there is a tipping point - and then logistics is done through dozens of "private" blockchains, which i will better is orders of magnitude simpler and more efficient than now.

TheColorYellow 8y ago

"There’s nothing being done here that couldn’t or shouldn’t just be handled with a traditional database." Okay, I'll bite. A few questions that I think lead to the idea of a DLT system being an appropriate fit: If it's a single

TheColorYellow 8y ago

Help me out here, I really don't see how a traditional database could solve the problem today. If you have various different, independent actors that operate in a shared environment but with distinct roles, how does traditional DBs help you do anything that isn't already being done today? For example, sharing data between those actors is still a heavy duty process. Trusting the data coming to you from other actors is still a high risk area, even if they aren't intentionally acting maliciously. Determining actors who have acted in poor faith without trusted and transparent data sources is incredibly difficult as well. How do you overcome these issues and come to the point of a centralized DB either? Who's going to own that central DB and pay for everything going into and out of it? So in that way, I don't see your point about how a traditional or central DB could solve these issues. I agree with all your other points, and I certainly agree the buzzword charm is heavy as always with this topic, but I don't buy that part. Happy to hear otherwise. Full transparency, to me, it does seem like DLT has an enterprise value so I'm a bit more of a homer than most.

fragsworth 8y ago
> sharing data between those actors is still a heavy duty process. Utter nonsense. Everything is HARDER TO DO when done through a blockchain. > Trusting the data coming to you from other actors is still a high risk area Utter nonsense. Public / private key encryption solves this in the same way a blockchain would, because a blockchain uses public / private key encryption. > Who's going to own that central DB and pay for everything going into and out of it? Walmart. Or IBM. It would likely cost less than $50/month of AWS resources, including backups and redundancy.
- TheColorYellow 8y ago
  > Everything is HARDER TO DO when done through a blockchain Could you explain? PKI is solves the issue of identity. It can't solve all the issues around accuracy, consistency, and provenance when it comes to data sharing. Ignoring the idea that you think it's a cheap endeavor, my bigger point is that putting every single bit of the responsibility on a single entity is a tough challenge.