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> Blockchain offers the capacity to create a “digital birth certificate” for every part and update it each time the part moves through the supply chain or is in

> Blockchain offers the capacity to create a “digital birth certificate” for every part and update it each time the part moves through the supply chain or is installed on a plane. The part’s status also gets updated every time the plane is serviced or inspected by a technician. They think it's better to use a blockchain for this instead of a spreadsheet.

waych 5y ago
Blockchain allows multiple parties to amend data using distributed and untrusting infrastructure, in a tamper proof way. The problems addressed are a bit more involved than a spreadsheet.
- qeternity 5y ago
  This is classic blockchain handwaving. If you’re an airplane manufacturer sourcing parts, you’re going to be placing a hell of a lot of trust in your partners. Jumping through all the hoops of blockchain gets you very little, if anything, net of cost.
  - reportt 5y ago
    The only time in which you would need blockchain over a centralized DB is when everyone needs access to the DB, but no one trusts each other. Like if you needed to store healthcare information for multiple people which theoretically could be accessed by multiple competing hospitals or something. It's a lot of overhead to legitimize not just using a centralized DB for most applications.
    - nexuist 5y ago
      For most applications, yes. But the "multiple people which theoretically could be accessed by multiple competing hospitals" is actually a real use case too. In many fields competitors could benefit from having access to the same curated, real time dataset. For example, a list of pharmacies or local insurance policy plans if you're a hospital. The problem is that none of the players in the game are incentivized to build this service because it requires someone to host the server on their infrastructure - and if you don't host it yourself, what happens if/when your partner decides to shut it down, or cut you out, or serve you false information? With a small blockchain each competitor can host their own version of the data and share new rows in an auditable, traceable, and permanent way (such that another user cannot go in and delete anything). It's easy to get lost in the hype, but peer to peer applications always serve valid use cases. A peer to peer database is no different even if it's enamored by cryptobros and scammers.
      - XorNot 5y ago
        How would this solve anything? Competing for what? If a bunch of people are competing on say, price, then what's stopping them putting any number they want into the system, or similarly just rejecting every number anyone else puts into the system? They have no aligned interests in the blockchain, and outside of it the legal system already defines their responsibility (i.e. prices must be advertised accurately). "Blockchain" aka a Git repository is only useful when multiple trusted parties are trying to coordinate a central source of truth without inadvertently removing each others changes. At which point we can dispense with anything that sounds like cryptocurrency because it's all just signed commits.
    - madeofpalk 5y ago
      Doesn't this only work if no one has the ability to take over 50% of the network?
      - 2cb 5y ago
        Theoretically, but there are ways to protect against this. That's what proof-of-work and proof-of-stake are for instance. Certainly there is a huge financial incentive to run a 51% attack on Bitcoin or Ethereum but thus far no one has managed it.
    - KptMarchewa 5y ago
      >The only time in which you would need blockchain over a centralized DB is when everyone needs access to the DB, but no one trusts each other. How is that not solved by a layer of permissions?
      - wongarsu 5y ago
        If you have one trusted party that can run a database with permission system and audit trail, then you don't need a blockchain. But if no one trusts each other, but you still require everyone to have the ability to update some data, then a blockchain becomes useful
        toomuchtodo 5y ago
        My multiple healthcare providers use OAuth and the electronic medical record system made by Epic to exchange my medical records, no blockchain required. Apple Health obtains access to all of the data at various providers through the same mechanism. At a higher level, if you’re willing to do business with someone, and you’re providing or accepting fiat, goods, or services, there is a baseline level of trust between parties and an understanding that any breakdowns in trust will be resolved by contract law and courts.
        toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Replying to my own comment as the edit window has timed out. Apple has coincidently released functionality as part of iOS 15 for verifiable health records data. Note the use of digital signature crypto primitives. > Find out how you can securely request access to someone's verifiable health records and incorporate that data safely into your app. The Health app helps people download, view, and share their health records, including their COVID-19 immunization and test results — and iOS 15 brings support for the Smart Health Card, a verifiable health record that incorporates the FHIR health data standard. We'll show you how your app can go about requesting access to this record and how you can verify the signature of the file using CryptoKit and the issuer's public key. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10089/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10089/
    - mytherin 5y ago
      That use case is highly suspect. The reason sharing medical records is difficult is because medical records are sensitive information. Blockchain technology does not solve this problem, and in fact makes it worse. By the very nature of blockchain every single hospital would now need to store all of the medical information of everybody in the country. That means if a single hospital is compromised (which is inevitable) the medical history of every single person in the country will be leaked. At that point, you might as well just place everybody's medical records online for all to see, the end result will be very similar. Hospitals could encrypt this information inside the blockchain, but then they would need to contact each other for the keys, which defeats the entire point of the blockchain. At that point they might as well contact each other for the data, after all. Using blockchain technology also means you cannot abide by GDPR's right to forget. That means storing any personal information in a blockchain is a legal liability, at least in the EU, which limits its potential use cases even further.
      - 2cb 5y ago
        > Using blockchain technology also means you cannot abide by GDPR's right to forget. That means storing any personal information in a blockchain is a legal liability, at least in the EU, which limits its potential use cases even further. Yes indeed, blockchains aren't suitable for storing personal data. No public decentralised network is. IPFS wouldn't be either for instance. By nature such networks assume no one peer can be trusted. Not the sort of thing you want to trust with confidential information. This openness is often sold as a feature, for example running your supply chain through a blockchain means there is a publicly auditable ledger of every step, so a company claiming to have an ethical supply chain could theoretically point to that blockchain as proof. This is potentially interesting imo. Most enterprise blockchain solutions I've seen are hybrid ones. A business can store personal data in a regular database and have non-sensitive data on a blockchain (as per the example above). The advantage of this (outside of the above use case) being that you can run SQL queries on large data sets much faster if that data is stored on a distributed ledger. (Note: this is what the companies selling those solutions claim. I don't have first hand experience with blockchains in an enterprise context so I couldn't tell you if this is true - I imagine it'd depend on the database and blockchain in question.) Final point though, these aren't necessarily proprietary blockchain solutions as such. They're more like SDKs businesses can use to build their own blockchains, code their own smart contracts, etc. Whether this is actually useful for enterprise... I honestly couldn't tell you. I do think the supply chain stuff is interesting. I also think using it as a system to detect counterfeit items is another good use case for businesses. In the past, companies have created apps where you can scan a QR code and it confirms the legitimacy of the product, but counterfeiters just made QR codes that tricked the app. If each unit is tracked on a public blockchain, it should be possible to verify legitimacy with near 100% certainty.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    Having a database that can run through multiple nodes should be very enticing given the recent ransomware attacks that ground centralized databases to a halt. Instead of waiting days to restore their billing system, Colonial could have just brought in more nodes under a blockchain system and sacrificed the ransomware'd ones. As long as one survived with the data intact, all other nodes would have been able to get the data from it while verifying lack of tampering (something your backups can't tell you without lots of hard work). Don't we argue against centralization on HN all of the time? There's so many good arguments against putting everything you rely on onto one server that can get bopped by random Ukrainian teenagers.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      Where would the data have survived? Colonial would have to be paying someone to hold their extra nodes, in which case....they could've just paid to hold backups anyway.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
      > Colonial could have just brought in more nodes under a blockchain system How is that different from having backup copies with a third party? Organizations really need to learn how to make ransmoware-proof backups. Blockchain has many uses but by itself won't protect anyone against ransomware attacks.
      - qeternity 5y ago
        It's not different. Like I said, it's just classic blockchain handwaving.
    - qeternity 5y ago
      > Don't we argue against centralization on HN all of the time? No, we argue the right paradigm for the right use case. Both centralization and decentralization have their pros and cons. But the blockchain decentralize-all-the-things group think is just people who don't quite grasp the tech being blinded by the hype. What you've described (adding more nodes) is just classic DR: spin up your infra from append-only backups in a warm site, or better yet, failover to a hot site with minimal downtime.
  - waych 5y ago
    How much value do you give to being tamper proof, to having multi party untrusting infrastructure, to being decentralized? How much do those add up to in your net cost calculation? How do achieve for these with your alternative solutions? What does that cost? The airplane manufacturer doesn't want to expose their database to their partners. They also don't want to write bespoke applications and services with their partners and doesn't really expect them to adapt to those interfaces that in turn front the database. None of this helps reconcile wtf happened across systems when sides disagree. Having a common distributed way to share a ledger is a valid problem to have and a blockchain is a valid way to solve that problem. Contracts further sweeten the pot.
beckingz 5y ago
For use cases like this, the automation needed to get the data into and out of a blockchain may make it a better solution than spreadsheets.
- andyana 5y ago
  No.

waych 5y ago

Blockchain allows multiple parties to amend data using distributed and untrusting infrastructure, in a tamper proof way. The problems addressed are a bit more involved than a spreadsheet.

qeternity 5y ago
This is classic blockchain handwaving. If you’re an airplane manufacturer sourcing parts, you’re going to be placing a hell of a lot of trust in your partners. Jumping through all the hoops of blockchain gets you very little, if anything, net of cost.
- reportt 5y ago
  The only time in which you would need blockchain over a centralized DB is when everyone needs access to the DB, but no one trusts each other. Like if you needed to store healthcare information for multiple people which theoretically could be accessed by multiple competing hospitals or something. It's a lot of overhead to legitimize not just using a centralized DB for most applications.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    For most applications, yes. But the "multiple people which theoretically could be accessed by multiple competing hospitals" is actually a real use case too. In many fields competitors could benefit from having access to the same curated, real time dataset. For example, a list of pharmacies or local insurance policy plans if you're a hospital. The problem is that none of the players in the game are incentivized to build this service because it requires someone to host the server on their infrastructure - and if you don't host it yourself, what happens if/when your partner decides to shut it down, or cut you out, or serve you false information? With a small blockchain each competitor can host their own version of the data and share new rows in an auditable, traceable, and permanent way (such that another user cannot go in and delete anything). It's easy to get lost in the hype, but peer to peer applications always serve valid use cases. A peer to peer database is no different even if it's enamored by cryptobros and scammers.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      How would this solve anything? Competing for what? If a bunch of people are competing on say, price, then what's stopping them putting any number they want into the system, or similarly just rejecting every number anyone else puts into the system? They have no aligned interests in the blockchain, and outside of it the legal system already defines their responsibility (i.e. prices must be advertised accurately). "Blockchain" aka a Git repository is only useful when multiple trusted parties are trying to coordinate a central source of truth without inadvertently removing each others changes. At which point we can dispense with anything that sounds like cryptocurrency because it's all just signed commits.
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    Doesn't this only work if no one has the ability to take over 50% of the network?
    - 2cb 5y ago
      Theoretically, but there are ways to protect against this. That's what proof-of-work and proof-of-stake are for instance. Certainly there is a huge financial incentive to run a 51% attack on Bitcoin or Ethereum but thus far no one has managed it.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    >The only time in which you would need blockchain over a centralized DB is when everyone needs access to the DB, but no one trusts each other. How is that not solved by a layer of permissions?
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      If you have one trusted party that can run a database with permission system and audit trail, then you don't need a blockchain. But if no one trusts each other, but you still require everyone to have the ability to update some data, then a blockchain becomes useful
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        My multiple healthcare providers use OAuth and the electronic medical record system made by Epic to exchange my medical records, no blockchain required. Apple Health obtains access to all of the data at various providers through the same mechanism. At a higher level, if you’re willing to do business with someone, and you’re providing or accepting fiat, goods, or services, there is a baseline level of trust between parties and an understanding that any breakdowns in trust will be resolved by contract law and courts.
        toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Replying to my own comment as the edit window has timed out. Apple has coincidently released functionality as part of iOS 15 for verifiable health records data. Note the use of digital signature crypto primitives. > Find out how you can securely request access to someone's verifiable health records and incorporate that data safely into your app. The Health app helps people download, view, and share their health records, including their COVID-19 immunization and test results — and iOS 15 brings support for the Smart Health Card, a verifiable health record that incorporates the FHIR health data standard. We'll show you how your app can go about requesting access to this record and how you can verify the signature of the file using CryptoKit and the issuer's public key. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10089/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10089/
  - mytherin 5y ago
    That use case is highly suspect. The reason sharing medical records is difficult is because medical records are sensitive information. Blockchain technology does not solve this problem, and in fact makes it worse. By the very nature of blockchain every single hospital would now need to store all of the medical information of everybody in the country. That means if a single hospital is compromised (which is inevitable) the medical history of every single person in the country will be leaked. At that point, you might as well just place everybody's medical records online for all to see, the end result will be very similar. Hospitals could encrypt this information inside the blockchain, but then they would need to contact each other for the keys, which defeats the entire point of the blockchain. At that point they might as well contact each other for the data, after all. Using blockchain technology also means you cannot abide by GDPR's right to forget. That means storing any personal information in a blockchain is a legal liability, at least in the EU, which limits its potential use cases even further.
    - 2cb 5y ago
      > Using blockchain technology also means you cannot abide by GDPR's right to forget. That means storing any personal information in a blockchain is a legal liability, at least in the EU, which limits its potential use cases even further. Yes indeed, blockchains aren't suitable for storing personal data. No public decentralised network is. IPFS wouldn't be either for instance. By nature such networks assume no one peer can be trusted. Not the sort of thing you want to trust with confidential information. This openness is often sold as a feature, for example running your supply chain through a blockchain means there is a publicly auditable ledger of every step, so a company claiming to have an ethical supply chain could theoretically point to that blockchain as proof. This is potentially interesting imo. Most enterprise blockchain solutions I've seen are hybrid ones. A business can store personal data in a regular database and have non-sensitive data on a blockchain (as per the example above). The advantage of this (outside of the above use case) being that you can run SQL queries on large data sets much faster if that data is stored on a distributed ledger. (Note: this is what the companies selling those solutions claim. I don't have first hand experience with blockchains in an enterprise context so I couldn't tell you if this is true - I imagine it'd depend on the database and blockchain in question.) Final point though, these aren't necessarily proprietary blockchain solutions as such. They're more like SDKs businesses can use to build their own blockchains, code their own smart contracts, etc. Whether this is actually useful for enterprise... I honestly couldn't tell you. I do think the supply chain stuff is interesting. I also think using it as a system to detect counterfeit items is another good use case for businesses. In the past, companies have created apps where you can scan a QR code and it confirms the legitimacy of the product, but counterfeiters just made QR codes that tricked the app. If each unit is tracked on a public blockchain, it should be possible to verify legitimacy with near 100% certainty.
- nexuist 5y ago
  Having a database that can run through multiple nodes should be very enticing given the recent ransomware attacks that ground centralized databases to a halt. Instead of waiting days to restore their billing system, Colonial could have just brought in more nodes under a blockchain system and sacrificed the ransomware'd ones. As long as one survived with the data intact, all other nodes would have been able to get the data from it while verifying lack of tampering (something your backups can't tell you without lots of hard work). Don't we argue against centralization on HN all of the time? There's so many good arguments against putting everything you rely on onto one server that can get bopped by random Ukrainian teenagers.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Where would the data have survived? Colonial would have to be paying someone to hold their extra nodes, in which case....they could've just paid to hold backups anyway.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
    > Colonial could have just brought in more nodes under a blockchain system How is that different from having backup copies with a third party? Organizations really need to learn how to make ransmoware-proof backups. Blockchain has many uses but by itself won't protect anyone against ransomware attacks.
    - qeternity 5y ago
      It's not different. Like I said, it's just classic blockchain handwaving.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    > Don't we argue against centralization on HN all of the time? No, we argue the right paradigm for the right use case. Both centralization and decentralization have their pros and cons. But the blockchain decentralize-all-the-things group think is just people who don't quite grasp the tech being blinded by the hype. What you've described (adding more nodes) is just classic DR: spin up your infra from append-only backups in a warm site, or better yet, failover to a hot site with minimal downtime.
- waych 5y ago
  How much value do you give to being tamper proof, to having multi party untrusting infrastructure, to being decentralized? How much do those add up to in your net cost calculation? How do achieve for these with your alternative solutions? What does that cost? The airplane manufacturer doesn't want to expose their database to their partners. They also don't want to write bespoke applications and services with their partners and doesn't really expect them to adapt to those interfaces that in turn front the database. None of this helps reconcile wtf happened across systems when sides disagree. Having a common distributed way to share a ledger is a valid problem to have and a blockchain is a valid way to solve that problem. Contracts further sweeten the pot.

beckingz 5y ago

For use cases like this, the automation needed to get the data into and out of a blockchain may make it a better solution than spreadsheets.

andyana 5y ago
No.