12 ms·

This has always been obvious to anyone who spent the smallest amount of time working in consumer retail. Customer comes in and wants to buy a patio set they saw

This has always been obvious to anyone who spent the smallest amount of time working in consumer retail. Customer comes in and wants to buy a patio set they saw in the catalog. You check the database - says there are two in the back. You go to the back. You look for like ten minutes. Patio set is nowhere to be found. Customer has left in frustration by the time you return. The hard problem has never been the specific form of database used to store info about the real world. The hard problem has always - and will always - be enforcing the correspondence between what's in the database and what's in the real world. This problem couldn't be solved at a single store in a single fairly small city. It's not gonna be solved worldwide.

nikanj 5y ago
Easy! Let's just make sure the people who stole the two patio sets update the blockchain. I mean, people who steal / ransom / hack bitcoin still update the blockchain, so criminals clearly can follow the rules
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > make sure the people who stole the two patio sets It probably isn’t stolen. It’s more likely delivered to another store, still on the truck, still at the factory, or was sold and not recorded.
  - zarq 5y ago
    Or someone has it on their cart on the way to the checkout.
    - nucleardog 5y ago
      Or someone had it on their cart on the way to the checkout, changed their mind, and somehow managed to cram it in a freezer behind some milk or something.
      - barkingcat 5y ago
        this happens at Ikea a lot - people take the thing and then decide they don't want it... there's a lot of places for things to go in the warehouse pickup section of an ikea store
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    Or someone picked it up to buy it, thought against it, and dropped it off in the wrong place.
- daniellarusso 5y ago
  Or the box got stabbed with a forklift, bent a bunch of the pieces, and they are piled in the back somewhere, and the assistant manager handling it no longer works there. Or the customer returned it because it was damaged, so now it is in inventory again. Or, inventory is batched processes, so it will take at least a few hours before inventory is current.
  - ska 5y ago
    Or some customer moved the boxes behind other product boxes, to "save it". Etc. etc. Inventory management is a whole industry of it's own for a reason.
    - drewzero1 5y ago
      Or the customer emptied a large (inexpensive) package and hid a smaller (more valuable) item inside, leaving the unwitting cashier to scan the larger package at checkout and now counts for both items are off. Or the vendor discontinued the item and replaced it with a slightly different one, but they both got put in under the same stock number and are hanging on the same hook. No matter how much we try to perfect the digital world, the real world will always be messy, and interfaces between the two will always be difficult.
- loceng 5y ago
  Well, if they had tracking tags on them that can't get removed then you'd see when the inventory is now gone.
  - daniellarusso 5y ago
    Unless the tag could not be damaged, or interference from an electrical issue would not cause reading issues, or there are no other materials or objects that would prevent reading the tag, or the wrong tag was affixed prior to being delivered to the store (swapped).
    - hamiltonkibbe 5y ago
      Easy, affix the tag to the item with a blockchain so you know it cant be removed or tampered with.
      - munk-a 5y ago
        Quite correct - everyone knows that blockchains are basically just an immutable database. I read it on hacker news! Just to confirm - nobody has ever or will ever make a data entry mistake right? Good, I hoped they wouldn't.
  - jameshart 5y ago
    Big package gets delivered. Two people working down the delivery, scanning and tagging every item. Both of them scan and tag opposite ends of the same box with inventory markers. An immutable record is created that says there are two of these things in stock. Someone buys it. It gets checked out. One of the markers gets scanned, an immutable record is created saying there's still one in stock. Physical reality has a way of screwing with all the best laid plans of computer systems. As Pat Helland says: there's no transaction rollback when a forklift drives over a box of eggs.
bordercases 5y ago
Large corporations that can afford to build and organize vertically integrated supply chains are pursuing this angle (e.g. Walmart Amazon Alibaba), and although it's unlikely they'll be totally robust, they've certainly made strides in accounting for the location and ownership status of goods at large scales.
tshaddox 5y ago
Okay, but surely this is rare? I’ve used online stock checks for retail stores and found them to be accurate the overwhelming majority of the time. Obviously it’s going to occasionally happen that someone stole an item or has an item in their cart when you check, but that hardly means that inventory databases are useless.
- Edman274 5y ago
  Microcenter deliberately lies about the stock of graphics cards on their website by saying that there are none in stock - even if they have some at the physical store itself - because, as overheard from a long term employee: "Just imagine what would happen if we said we had a graphics card online. It would be pandemonium. We set the stock at zero. If they come in, they'll be sold anyway."
- mdorazio 5y ago
  Not sure where you're shopping, but I've found them to be highly inaccurate the majority of the time. Useful for telling me where something is located, but generally useless for actual quantity accuracy. This is for stores like Home Depot, Lowes, and Target.
- he0001 5y ago
  Nah, I’ve been doing inventory counts where I’ve been counting nuts and bolts for the sole purpose to update the inventory databases. These were nuts and bolts for trains but the inventory database were not correct for different reasons.
- hirundo 5y ago
  That's not my experience. Last month I tried to buy a specific vacuum cleaner at Lowes. Online said it's in stock. It wasn't. Another nearby Lowes said it was in stock. It wasn't. I finally got smart enough to call the third Lowes instead of driving there. The guy said "it shows as in stock but let me check". They know. It wasn't. This has been roughly par for the course in my experience, and not particularly with Lowes.
- na85 5y ago
  Inventory databases are not useless as you have correctly observed. However, blockchains offer zero advantages over conventional inventory databases.
nexuist 5y ago
It's not a hard problem, it's an impossible problem, because it violates the first law of cybersecurity: physical access means game over. When you start allowing untrained and un-punishable customers to mess with your meatspace database, of course it will lose all semblance of usefulness. This problem is not hard to solve when you limit physical access, i.e. in a warehouse, pharmacy, or locked room where multiple employees are responsible for checking in and out items. These solutions arose directly out of your conundrum in retail, and investigations are launched when someone discovers a mismatch between inventory and real life (think toxic chemicals, drugs, etc). Of course it just so happens that nobody wants to go to a grocery store where they're not allowed to touch the items.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > problem is not hard to solve when you limit physical access, i.e. in a warehouse, pharmacy, or locked room where multiple employees are responsible for checking in and out items Do you know anyone who works in retail, a warehouse or a pharmacy? Nothing is ever where it should be in the quantities the computer thinks it’s in.
- foobarian 5y ago
  They used to work like that. You would come up to comrade cashier, and tell her what you wanted one by one, and pay. I still remember the shock when I went into a supermarket for the first time. Felt like going to a "authorized personnel only" place.
  - evancox100 5y ago
    So was this in the USSR? Approx what timeframe was your first supermarket visit?
    - waterfowl 5y ago
      this was how things worked before supermarkets in general - you'd ask the general store clerk for x units of y good, think the deli counter or auto parts store model.
edpichler 5y ago
Even though this happening often, software is still the best solution we have. They know that, and they don't stop using a system for it. Moreover, the same correlation problem would happen (even worse) by using paper for the records. So, why should we stop using blockchain?
- ianai 5y ago
  Because a major national power is outlawing it.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Because it isn't fundamentally better at this task than existing solutions?
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  Blockchain doesn't solve any of the problems and in fact introduces new ones (like non-reversible theft). The question is why should we start using blockchain?
- skywhopper 5y ago
  Blockchain in the form of something like Bitcoin is probably the worst possible database for this sort of ledger. It’s wildly inefficient, slow, and subject to failures of all sorts. If it’s a public blockchain with public nodes, it’s subject to being attacked by malicious actors. If it’s entirely controlled by the legal authority, then there’s no reason to use a blockchain.
- edpichler 5y ago
  I got a lot of downvotes. I wrote my question to discuss and to learn from other people's arguments, not to offend anyone.
arberx 5y ago
Stores aren't a great example. Let's take houses, where the buyer and seller both need a title company to validate and transfer ownership. This process is extremely inefficent, and costly. It's pretty reasonable to imagine a public ledger replacing this process. The real world enforcement of such thing is really the only hurdle.
- abduhl 5y ago
  I get to your last line and all I can think: "Wow, it's so simple, implementation is the only detail we haven't figured out yet."
  - arberx 5y ago
    Just because there isn't a solution/implementation currently, doesn't mean there won't be.
- hobs 5y ago
  right, but there's no reason for that ledger to be on the blockchain - since property rights are always enforced by the government we should just have a public ledger that is akin to the ledger the gov records about driver's licenses.
  - arberx 5y ago
    A centralized goverment is one mechanism of enforcement yes. No reason there can't be others. One that doesn't require blind faith/trust. Arguably police are decentralized mechanisms of enforcement, no reason to formalize that responsibilty in a DAO.
    - pavel_lishin 5y ago
      It still requires blind faith and trust, but now you're trusting a combination of computer code that cannot apply common sense to transactions, and human programmers and bad actors, who can through accident or malice do a great job of fucking up your day.
mdoms 5y ago
In fact blockchains only exacerbate the problem. In your stock keeping system you can simply correct the error by entering a new stock number. In the blockchain you can... what? Ask every participant in the system to agree to roll back that transaction, pretty please?
- acdha 5y ago
  This highlights why “slow, expensive database” has not been a common need: you can handle that in an append-only style by publishing correction records but that puts even more strain on an already struggling system.
- la_fayette 5y ago
  Unless you use an erp-system, which most companies have. In such systems, you cannot change things at will, because of compliance. Acctually, if you consider compliance regulations, a blockchain based approach would be useful...
version_five 5y ago
Right. When blockchain became mainstream in 2017, I went to a blockchain for government event, and they had a speaker essentially explaining that blockchain was an immutable database, and that it could be used to replace your existing databases with something that couldn't be corrupted. This was the "business" interpretation of blockchain for a long time, and people latched on to the database part and imagined all kinds of things that could come out of a more accurate database, without actually understanding how this was achieved. So we ended up with these use cases where blockchain was supposed to magically solve physical world problems, because "that's what it does", without any causal mechanism.
- trutannus 5y ago
  Governments are the largest perpetuators of the "blockchain for real world assets" silliness. Non technical managers tend to push for these sorts of things to get a "blockchain project" to their name. For some reason the idea of lying to the blockchain isn't something that occurs to them very often.
  - version_five 5y ago
    If something is effectively "magic" to someone, even in the base case, an improvement is just another sort of magic. This is why I don't have a lot of confidence in big-picture types that don't know anything about computer science but hold some parallel business analogies in their head and think they can make decisions on that basis. On the other side, sometimes interesting and valuable things can happen when you don't have reality as a constraint. I read (but have not verified) that William Gibson's world of cyberspace and internet etc. in the Sprawl books ended up being so attractive largely because he understood almost nothing about computers.
    - trutannus 5y ago
      > hold some parallel business analogies in their head and think they can make decisions on that basis The advantage with folks like this is it becomes abundantly clear when they open their mouths that they have no idea what they are talking about most of the time. The major disadvantage though is these people tend to be the loudest in the space, and are heard more since people tend to want to hear exciting sexy ideas over the mundane reality of things.
psyc 5y ago
Long ago, I was a department manager at Walmart. Keeping the database even within the ballpark of real inventory was a labor-intensive, annoying, never-done task. My full-time job was struggling to make the point-of-sale replenishment work just tolerably well. It went in waves. Periods where most of the counts seemed pretty good, then periods where it was a mess. After all, it was just me manually locating and counting everything. Too many items with too many places for them to go missing “in the back”.
- tjchear 5y ago
  What do you think are the reasons the actual counts get out of sync with db? I presume it's mostly theft, but are there any other reasons?
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
    I would venture misplacement is more common than it'd be intuitive to layperson. Whether an individual item that was returned or moved and is on the wrong shelf on wrong bay or underneath the shelf or in some weird corner; up to a whole skid of stuff mislabeled (skid group SKU is not accurate of the individual SKUs inside) or in the wrong place or not accounted for or counted twice. A lot of human error during unloading trucks, scanning, counting, inventorying, etc.
    - mumblemumble 5y ago
      Ah, but if you managed it all with a blockchain, it could be cryptographically verifiable human error.
  - newsclues 5y ago
    Mistakes or mis-sorted inventory. Customers move stuff too. Busy staff, staff that don’t care or don’t know better. Managed bookstore logistics.
  - psyc 5y ago
    Theft, yes. There are other leaks, such as a lazy or rushed employee discarding broken merch without reporting it. Also, customer satisfaction trumps other policies. That is not just PR. If anything about the POS system annoys a customer for 2 seconds, like a barcode that won’t scan, it got circumvented. And again, the warehouse out back was so huge and chaotic, stuff just got lost, to be discovered months later.
bogota 5y ago
That sounds like inventory management more than ownership which do obviously have overlap. But why would having something minted on purchase of say a Rolex be bad? Then when you sell it you could transfer that to the new owner. Showing a chain all the way back to the original purchase. This still has the issue of someone who could come into ownership of a minted item without the object and then try and make a convincing fake but this at first glance sounds like a great way to reduce fakes in the market significantly.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Situation #1: Lets say a thief steals the Rolex from X. It goes through the black market, and now Y claims to own that Rolex. Lets take situation #2. X realizes that Situation#1 is possible. So X sells his Rolex to Y but fails to disclose that its blockchain-tracked. Now Y has the Rolex (and is out of some money). Now X-claims that Y stole the Rolex from him. How does Blockchain differentiate from #1 (where the Rolex should be returned to X) and #2 (where the Rolex should be returned to Y) ? The only way to solve this issue is to ensure that Y transacts on the _same_ blockchain. Which... isn't the case at all for NFTs, Bitcoin, DOGE, and etc. etc. There are so many blockchains (and each NFT basically makes its own blockchain). It is very easy for X to transact on the wrong blockchain to fool Y right now. (or off-blockchain, by transacting in USD for example).
intotheabyss 5y ago
Developers in crypto know about the oracle problem better than anyone. It's not some sort of revelation. The oracle problem has been discussed ad nauseum within the community since at least 2011/2012.
- Slartie 5y ago
  If that is so, then why are there still "developers in crypto" left? Shouldn't you expect from smart people that they eventually realize the conceptual infeasibility of what they are trying to accomplish?
  - intotheabyss 5y ago
    Well the oracle problem has been solved for something as simple as price feeds. So today you can easily get price feeds from any pair of assets into the blockchain in a decentralized way. Why are there developers in crypto? Because it's very cool and interesting? I'm currently working on building applications for Starkware and layer 2 networks and I'm loving it. It's totally wild what you can do with programmable money, like https://alchemix.fi/ https://alchemix.fi/ where you can get loans that repay themselves by providing liquidity to yield aggregating protocols. Totally new way of thinking about money and value. I think it's funny when people think this is useless. I suspect they wouldnt be saying that if they actually developed applications on the EVM
  - transpostmeta 5y ago
    It's not infeasible. The smart contract in the block chain just pays a third party to access real world data. The business model of the oracle provider is to provide accurate data and get paid for it. It works well enough for data that is public.
Grimm1 5y ago
In your case was the patio set sold to another customer or was it a logistics issue at the supplier etc or is there no way to know what the problem was? I think those are all separate problems that may have various solutions, and the only one that blockchain to my knowledge would even be remotely useful for is knowing where in the chain those sets not being in the store happened at.
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
Pat Helland has a great quip he's used in his talks over the years, along the lines of "it doesn't matter how consistent your database is if a forklift drives over the box in the warehouse."

nikanj 5y ago

Easy! Let's just make sure the people who stole the two patio sets update the blockchain. I mean, people who steal / ransom / hack bitcoin still update the blockchain, so criminals clearly can follow the rules

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> make sure the people who stole the two patio sets It probably isn’t stolen. It’s more likely delivered to another store, still on the truck, still at the factory, or was sold and not recorded.
- zarq 5y ago
  Or someone has it on their cart on the way to the checkout.
  - nucleardog 5y ago
    Or someone had it on their cart on the way to the checkout, changed their mind, and somehow managed to cram it in a freezer behind some milk or something.
    - barkingcat 5y ago
      this happens at Ikea a lot - people take the thing and then decide they don't want it... there's a lot of places for things to go in the warehouse pickup section of an ikea store
- jcranmer 5y ago
  Or someone picked it up to buy it, thought against it, and dropped it off in the wrong place.
daniellarusso 5y ago
Or the box got stabbed with a forklift, bent a bunch of the pieces, and they are piled in the back somewhere, and the assistant manager handling it no longer works there. Or the customer returned it because it was damaged, so now it is in inventory again. Or, inventory is batched processes, so it will take at least a few hours before inventory is current.
- ska 5y ago
  Or some customer moved the boxes behind other product boxes, to "save it". Etc. etc. Inventory management is a whole industry of it's own for a reason.
  - drewzero1 5y ago
    Or the customer emptied a large (inexpensive) package and hid a smaller (more valuable) item inside, leaving the unwitting cashier to scan the larger package at checkout and now counts for both items are off. Or the vendor discontinued the item and replaced it with a slightly different one, but they both got put in under the same stock number and are hanging on the same hook. No matter how much we try to perfect the digital world, the real world will always be messy, and interfaces between the two will always be difficult.
loceng 5y ago
Well, if they had tracking tags on them that can't get removed then you'd see when the inventory is now gone.
- daniellarusso 5y ago
  Unless the tag could not be damaged, or interference from an electrical issue would not cause reading issues, or there are no other materials or objects that would prevent reading the tag, or the wrong tag was affixed prior to being delivered to the store (swapped).
  - hamiltonkibbe 5y ago
    Easy, affix the tag to the item with a blockchain so you know it cant be removed or tampered with.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      Quite correct - everyone knows that blockchains are basically just an immutable database. I read it on hacker news! Just to confirm - nobody has ever or will ever make a data entry mistake right? Good, I hoped they wouldn't.
- jameshart 5y ago
  Big package gets delivered. Two people working down the delivery, scanning and tagging every item. Both of them scan and tag opposite ends of the same box with inventory markers. An immutable record is created that says there are two of these things in stock. Someone buys it. It gets checked out. One of the markers gets scanned, an immutable record is created saying there's still one in stock. Physical reality has a way of screwing with all the best laid plans of computer systems. As Pat Helland says: there's no transaction rollback when a forklift drives over a box of eggs.

bordercases 5y ago

Large corporations that can afford to build and organize vertically integrated supply chains are pursuing this angle (e.g. Walmart Amazon Alibaba), and although it's unlikely they'll be totally robust, they've certainly made strides in accounting for the location and ownership status of goods at large scales.

tshaddox 5y ago

Okay, but surely this is rare? I’ve used online stock checks for retail stores and found them to be accurate the overwhelming majority of the time. Obviously it’s going to occasionally happen that someone stole an item or has an item in their cart when you check, but that hardly means that inventory databases are useless.

Edman274 5y ago
Microcenter deliberately lies about the stock of graphics cards on their website by saying that there are none in stock - even if they have some at the physical store itself - because, as overheard from a long term employee: "Just imagine what would happen if we said we had a graphics card online. It would be pandemonium. We set the stock at zero. If they come in, they'll be sold anyway."
mdorazio 5y ago
Not sure where you're shopping, but I've found them to be highly inaccurate the majority of the time. Useful for telling me where something is located, but generally useless for actual quantity accuracy. This is for stores like Home Depot, Lowes, and Target.
he0001 5y ago
Nah, I’ve been doing inventory counts where I’ve been counting nuts and bolts for the sole purpose to update the inventory databases. These were nuts and bolts for trains but the inventory database were not correct for different reasons.
hirundo 5y ago
That's not my experience. Last month I tried to buy a specific vacuum cleaner at Lowes. Online said it's in stock. It wasn't. Another nearby Lowes said it was in stock. It wasn't. I finally got smart enough to call the third Lowes instead of driving there. The guy said "it shows as in stock but let me check". They know. It wasn't. This has been roughly par for the course in my experience, and not particularly with Lowes.
na85 5y ago
Inventory databases are not useless as you have correctly observed. However, blockchains offer zero advantages over conventional inventory databases.

nexuist 5y ago

It's not a hard problem, it's an impossible problem, because it violates the first law of cybersecurity: physical access means game over. When you start allowing untrained and un-punishable customers to mess with your meatspace database, of course it will lose all semblance of usefulness. This problem is not hard to solve when you limit physical access, i.e. in a warehouse, pharmacy, or locked room where multiple employees are responsible for checking in and out items. These solutions arose directly out of your conundrum in retail, and investigations are launched when someone discovers a mismatch between inventory and real life (think toxic chemicals, drugs, etc). Of course it just so happens that nobody wants to go to a grocery store where they're not allowed to touch the items.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> problem is not hard to solve when you limit physical access, i.e. in a warehouse, pharmacy, or locked room where multiple employees are responsible for checking in and out items Do you know anyone who works in retail, a warehouse or a pharmacy? Nothing is ever where it should be in the quantities the computer thinks it’s in.
foobarian 5y ago
They used to work like that. You would come up to comrade cashier, and tell her what you wanted one by one, and pay. I still remember the shock when I went into a supermarket for the first time. Felt like going to a "authorized personnel only" place.
- evancox100 5y ago
  So was this in the USSR? Approx what timeframe was your first supermarket visit?
  - waterfowl 5y ago
    this was how things worked before supermarkets in general - you'd ask the general store clerk for x units of y good, think the deli counter or auto parts store model.

edpichler 5y ago

Even though this happening often, software is still the best solution we have. They know that, and they don't stop using a system for it. Moreover, the same correlation problem would happen (even worse) by using paper for the records. So, why should we stop using blockchain?

ianai 5y ago
Because a major national power is outlawing it.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Because it isn't fundamentally better at this task than existing solutions?
hannasanarion 5y ago
Blockchain doesn't solve any of the problems and in fact introduces new ones (like non-reversible theft). The question is why should we start using blockchain?
skywhopper 5y ago
Blockchain in the form of something like Bitcoin is probably the worst possible database for this sort of ledger. It’s wildly inefficient, slow, and subject to failures of all sorts. If it’s a public blockchain with public nodes, it’s subject to being attacked by malicious actors. If it’s entirely controlled by the legal authority, then there’s no reason to use a blockchain.
edpichler 5y ago
I got a lot of downvotes. I wrote my question to discuss and to learn from other people's arguments, not to offend anyone.

arberx 5y ago

Stores aren't a great example. Let's take houses, where the buyer and seller both need a title company to validate and transfer ownership. This process is extremely inefficent, and costly. It's pretty reasonable to imagine a public ledger replacing this process. The real world enforcement of such thing is really the only hurdle.

abduhl 5y ago
I get to your last line and all I can think: "Wow, it's so simple, implementation is the only detail we haven't figured out yet."
- arberx 5y ago
  Just because there isn't a solution/implementation currently, doesn't mean there won't be.
hobs 5y ago
right, but there's no reason for that ledger to be on the blockchain - since property rights are always enforced by the government we should just have a public ledger that is akin to the ledger the gov records about driver's licenses.
- arberx 5y ago
  A centralized goverment is one mechanism of enforcement yes. No reason there can't be others. One that doesn't require blind faith/trust. Arguably police are decentralized mechanisms of enforcement, no reason to formalize that responsibilty in a DAO.
  - pavel_lishin 5y ago
    It still requires blind faith and trust, but now you're trusting a combination of computer code that cannot apply common sense to transactions, and human programmers and bad actors, who can through accident or malice do a great job of fucking up your day.

mdoms 5y ago

In fact blockchains only exacerbate the problem. In your stock keeping system you can simply correct the error by entering a new stock number. In the blockchain you can... what? Ask every participant in the system to agree to roll back that transaction, pretty please?

acdha 5y ago
This highlights why “slow, expensive database” has not been a common need: you can handle that in an append-only style by publishing correction records but that puts even more strain on an already struggling system.
la_fayette 5y ago
Unless you use an erp-system, which most companies have. In such systems, you cannot change things at will, because of compliance. Acctually, if you consider compliance regulations, a blockchain based approach would be useful...

version_five 5y ago

Right. When blockchain became mainstream in 2017, I went to a blockchain for government event, and they had a speaker essentially explaining that blockchain was an immutable database, and that it could be used to replace your existing databases with something that couldn't be corrupted. This was the "business" interpretation of blockchain for a long time, and people latched on to the database part and imagined all kinds of things that could come out of a more accurate database, without actually understanding how this was achieved. So we ended up with these use cases where blockchain was supposed to magically solve physical world problems, because "that's what it does", without any causal mechanism.

trutannus 5y ago
Governments are the largest perpetuators of the "blockchain for real world assets" silliness. Non technical managers tend to push for these sorts of things to get a "blockchain project" to their name. For some reason the idea of lying to the blockchain isn't something that occurs to them very often.
- version_five 5y ago
  If something is effectively "magic" to someone, even in the base case, an improvement is just another sort of magic. This is why I don't have a lot of confidence in big-picture types that don't know anything about computer science but hold some parallel business analogies in their head and think they can make decisions on that basis. On the other side, sometimes interesting and valuable things can happen when you don't have reality as a constraint. I read (but have not verified) that William Gibson's world of cyberspace and internet etc. in the Sprawl books ended up being so attractive largely because he understood almost nothing about computers.
  - trutannus 5y ago
    > hold some parallel business analogies in their head and think they can make decisions on that basis The advantage with folks like this is it becomes abundantly clear when they open their mouths that they have no idea what they are talking about most of the time. The major disadvantage though is these people tend to be the loudest in the space, and are heard more since people tend to want to hear exciting sexy ideas over the mundane reality of things.

psyc 5y ago

Long ago, I was a department manager at Walmart. Keeping the database even within the ballpark of real inventory was a labor-intensive, annoying, never-done task. My full-time job was struggling to make the point-of-sale replenishment work just tolerably well. It went in waves. Periods where most of the counts seemed pretty good, then periods where it was a mess. After all, it was just me manually locating and counting everything. Too many items with too many places for them to go missing “in the back”.

tjchear 5y ago
What do you think are the reasons the actual counts get out of sync with db? I presume it's mostly theft, but are there any other reasons?
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  I would venture misplacement is more common than it'd be intuitive to layperson. Whether an individual item that was returned or moved and is on the wrong shelf on wrong bay or underneath the shelf or in some weird corner; up to a whole skid of stuff mislabeled (skid group SKU is not accurate of the individual SKUs inside) or in the wrong place or not accounted for or counted twice. A lot of human error during unloading trucks, scanning, counting, inventorying, etc.
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    Ah, but if you managed it all with a blockchain, it could be cryptographically verifiable human error.
- newsclues 5y ago
  Mistakes or mis-sorted inventory. Customers move stuff too. Busy staff, staff that don’t care or don’t know better. Managed bookstore logistics.
- psyc 5y ago
  Theft, yes. There are other leaks, such as a lazy or rushed employee discarding broken merch without reporting it. Also, customer satisfaction trumps other policies. That is not just PR. If anything about the POS system annoys a customer for 2 seconds, like a barcode that won’t scan, it got circumvented. And again, the warehouse out back was so huge and chaotic, stuff just got lost, to be discovered months later.

bogota 5y ago

That sounds like inventory management more than ownership which do obviously have overlap. But why would having something minted on purchase of say a Rolex be bad? Then when you sell it you could transfer that to the new owner. Showing a chain all the way back to the original purchase. This still has the issue of someone who could come into ownership of a minted item without the object and then try and make a convincing fake but this at first glance sounds like a great way to reduce fakes in the market significantly.

dragontamer 5y ago
Situation #1: Lets say a thief steals the Rolex from X. It goes through the black market, and now Y claims to own that Rolex. Lets take situation #2. X realizes that Situation#1 is possible. So X sells his Rolex to Y but fails to disclose that its blockchain-tracked. Now Y has the Rolex (and is out of some money). Now X-claims that Y stole the Rolex from him. How does Blockchain differentiate from #1 (where the Rolex should be returned to X) and #2 (where the Rolex should be returned to Y) ? The only way to solve this issue is to ensure that Y transacts on the _same_ blockchain. Which... isn't the case at all for NFTs, Bitcoin, DOGE, and etc. etc. There are so many blockchains (and each NFT basically makes its own blockchain). It is very easy for X to transact on the wrong blockchain to fool Y right now. (or off-blockchain, by transacting in USD for example).

intotheabyss 5y ago

Developers in crypto know about the oracle problem better than anyone. It's not some sort of revelation. The oracle problem has been discussed ad nauseum within the community since at least 2011/2012.

Slartie 5y ago
If that is so, then why are there still "developers in crypto" left? Shouldn't you expect from smart people that they eventually realize the conceptual infeasibility of what they are trying to accomplish?
- intotheabyss 5y ago
  Well the oracle problem has been solved for something as simple as price feeds. So today you can easily get price feeds from any pair of assets into the blockchain in a decentralized way. Why are there developers in crypto? Because it's very cool and interesting? I'm currently working on building applications for Starkware and layer 2 networks and I'm loving it. It's totally wild what you can do with programmable money, like https://alchemix.fi/ https://alchemix.fi/ where you can get loans that repay themselves by providing liquidity to yield aggregating protocols. Totally new way of thinking about money and value. I think it's funny when people think this is useless. I suspect they wouldnt be saying that if they actually developed applications on the EVM
- transpostmeta 5y ago
  It's not infeasible. The smart contract in the block chain just pays a third party to access real world data. The business model of the oracle provider is to provide accurate data and get paid for it. It works well enough for data that is public.

Grimm1 5y ago

In your case was the patio set sold to another customer or was it a logistics issue at the supplier etc or is there no way to know what the problem was? I think those are all separate problems that may have various solutions, and the only one that blockchain to my knowledge would even be remotely useful for is knowing where in the chain those sets not being in the store happened at.

jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago

Pat Helland has a great quip he's used in his talks over the years, along the lines of "it doesn't matter how consistent your database is if a forklift drives over the box in the warehouse."