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Walmart Canada has used blockchain [1] to better their supply chains systems. I suspect when you say you "haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain"

Walmart Canada has used blockchain [1] to better their supply chains systems. I suspect when you say you "haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain" you're referring to the consumer space based on current offerings. I would argue that "blockchain" just as an idea and technology has plenty of use cases. [1] https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-to-solve-supply-chain-challenges https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-t...

dmead 5y ago
so would a database, or a linked list, or literally any data structure... again, a solution looking for a problem.
- yashg 5y ago
  Hammer in search of a nail.
cmdli 5y ago
I just don't see how that use case couldn't have been more easily served with a boring old centralized database. Why do you need a trustless system where all the users are either in-house or contractually obligated to not screw each other over?
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Probably in logistics where many nodes of many companies need to record offline quite often. Trucks, warehouses, resellers, manufacturers, all with their own systems and problems can record to the same ledger reliably.
  - yashg 5y ago
    And they can't on a Walmart owned database based system? You know the good old boring web application? HN is one example. Hundreds of people are using it, upvoting and commenting at at any given second. Works just fine.
    - jiggawatts 5y ago
      Federated database systems are totally a thing also! It's not even that hard to set up a pub-sub system, service bus, or whatever. There's entire ecosystems of vendors that have turnkey or SaaS solutions in this space also. People just forgot that these things can be done with boring old technology in the excitement of doing something hip and cool.
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      It is a Walmart owned database. It's a distributed p2p database via a private blockchain. Lots of end clients that go offline often and need to resync.
- systoll 5y ago
  Here’s a whitepaper on it https://uark.app.box.com/s/f7v6rk7xnwkjaetws7e1yaodomg883fi https://uark.app.box.com/s/f7v6rk7xnwkjaetws7e1yaodomg883fi . The merkle tree part of blockchains is absolutely valuable here… but that’s kind of where it ends. There’s no real consensus mechanism when there are 'merge conflicts', it needs manual overrides. It’s more like git than bitcoin – and it helps them for similar reasons to why git helps us even when there’s a canonical source. People go offline and can’t sync immediately to the master store; people want to write events down now and deal with discrepancies later; disagreements are reified and can be formally reviewed, etc. As best I can tell, it seems other aspects of blockchains just came along for the ride. The best open source code for their use case included it, and using it was better than building from scratch. The decentralisation is all but coded out – the central authority is the only one that can authorise transactions or resolve a 'merge conflict'.
philliphaydon 5y ago
Blockchain does not help supply chains. It doesn’t guarantee that things have been tampered with. It doesn’t solve any problems.
- everfree 5y ago
  An immutable database guarantees that the "paper trail" has not been tampered with. In supply chains, there's a lot to be said for having a paper trail even if (or especially if) some of the papers are fraudulently written.
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    How does block chain guarentee that something going from A to C via B is not tampered with in anyway?
    - everfree 5y ago
      It doesn't guarantee that. As I said, it guarantees that paper trails are permanent and cannot be fudged after the fact.
      - philliphaydon 5y ago
        So you have a permanent paper trail that cannot be changed, what problem has it solved?
        everfree 5y ago
        The problem of paper trails being changed. When something goes wrong, if you can't trust your paper trail, you can't attribute fault with certainty. Without an immutable shared database standard, it's difficult for processes like that to cross company lines. And supply chain is a fancy phrase for processes that cross many company lines.
        5y ago
jjtheblunt 5y ago
what establishes its effect as "better"
yashg 5y ago
Can you please connect me with someone in the tech team at Walmart Canada who was part of this implementation? I am really curious to know exactly what it is that they store in blockchain. What kind of chain it is public or private. What is the consensus mechanism? A public truly distributed PoW blockchain is slow and inefficient by design. It's a feature not a bug. A private, permissioned, controlled blockchain is pointless. So I really want to know what are these companies doing when they use blockchain for supposed benefits. Blockchain in supply chain is often the most publicized use case. It somehow assumes that since blockchain is immutable (actually it isn't) whatever you add to it is authentic. Using it for supply chain assumes that a supplier won't lie about the origin or if they employed child labor. Using a blockchain doesn't automatically guarantee any of these.
olliej 5y ago
I do not see anything in this that would not be resolved by a trivial database, and if you read the article that is what they have created: It is a private "blockchain" that only allows trusted participants, so doesn't require all the negative externalities of "blockchain". The only thing "blockchain" about what Walmart has done is riding the absurd investor hype for anything with blockchain in the title.
yashg 5y ago
The article is co-authored by two co-founders of a supply chain management solution company called DLT Labs that uses blockchain somewhere. I checked out their solution on their website. The product looks like any other web app. Is it really using a blockchain somewhere at the backend to store something? May be. It is certainly using some standard RDBMS to store the structured data. There's no way you can store all of that you see in the screenshots on a blockchain. So what it is that is actually being stored on a blockchain? Not clear. Is it possible that they use the word blockchain to get free PR? May be. I don't want to judge. The product page doesn't have the word blockchain anywhere. https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/asset-track https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/asset-track DL Freight, the product used by Walmart Canada also doesn't mention the word blockchain anywhere. There is just one mention of a shared ledger. https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/asset-track/dl-freight https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/asset-track/dl-freight Did find blockchain on this page https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/ecosystem https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/ecosystem But immediately you see this "And because its built using distributed ledger technology, every transaction is 100% auditable, immutable, and visible only to permissioned users – helping to create a genuine layer of trust between the parties that transact on the platform." It refers to permissioned users, so it's not a blockchain. Which is supposed to be permissionless. They aren't even claiming. They are calling it a distributed ledger. In fact I have noticed this even with R3 Corda. The enterprise blockchain provider. They use the term distributed ledger to describe their offering, not blockchain. But all the marketing material and PR pieces always tout blockchain in the headline. If something is permissioned, trustful and centralised, is it even a blockchain?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dmead 5y ago

so would a database, or a linked list, or literally any data structure... again, a solution looking for a problem.

yashg 5y ago
Hammer in search of a nail.

cmdli 5y ago

I just don't see how that use case couldn't have been more easily served with a boring old centralized database. Why do you need a trustless system where all the users are either in-house or contractually obligated to not screw each other over?

hunterb123 5y ago
Probably in logistics where many nodes of many companies need to record offline quite often. Trucks, warehouses, resellers, manufacturers, all with their own systems and problems can record to the same ledger reliably.
- yashg 5y ago
  And they can't on a Walmart owned database based system? You know the good old boring web application? HN is one example. Hundreds of people are using it, upvoting and commenting at at any given second. Works just fine.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    Federated database systems are totally a thing also! It's not even that hard to set up a pub-sub system, service bus, or whatever. There's entire ecosystems of vendors that have turnkey or SaaS solutions in this space also. People just forgot that these things can be done with boring old technology in the excitement of doing something hip and cool.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    It is a Walmart owned database. It's a distributed p2p database via a private blockchain. Lots of end clients that go offline often and need to resync.
systoll 5y ago
Here’s a whitepaper on it https://uark.app.box.com/s/f7v6rk7xnwkjaetws7e1yaodomg883fi https://uark.app.box.com/s/f7v6rk7xnwkjaetws7e1yaodomg883fi . The merkle tree part of blockchains is absolutely valuable here… but that’s kind of where it ends. There’s no real consensus mechanism when there are 'merge conflicts', it needs manual overrides. It’s more like git than bitcoin – and it helps them for similar reasons to why git helps us even when there’s a canonical source. People go offline and can’t sync immediately to the master store; people want to write events down now and deal with discrepancies later; disagreements are reified and can be formally reviewed, etc. As best I can tell, it seems other aspects of blockchains just came along for the ride. The best open source code for their use case included it, and using it was better than building from scratch. The decentralisation is all but coded out – the central authority is the only one that can authorise transactions or resolve a 'merge conflict'.

philliphaydon 5y ago

Blockchain does not help supply chains. It doesn’t guarantee that things have been tampered with. It doesn’t solve any problems.

everfree 5y ago
An immutable database guarantees that the "paper trail" has not been tampered with. In supply chains, there's a lot to be said for having a paper trail even if (or especially if) some of the papers are fraudulently written.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  How does block chain guarentee that something going from A to C via B is not tampered with in anyway?
  - everfree 5y ago
    It doesn't guarantee that. As I said, it guarantees that paper trails are permanent and cannot be fudged after the fact.
    - philliphaydon 5y ago
      So you have a permanent paper trail that cannot be changed, what problem has it solved?
      - everfree 5y ago
        The problem of paper trails being changed. When something goes wrong, if you can't trust your paper trail, you can't attribute fault with certainty. Without an immutable shared database standard, it's difficult for processes like that to cross company lines. And supply chain is a fancy phrase for processes that cross many company lines.
        5y ago

jjtheblunt 5y ago

what establishes its effect as "better"

yashg 5y ago

Can you please connect me with someone in the tech team at Walmart Canada who was part of this implementation? I am really curious to know exactly what it is that they store in blockchain. What kind of chain it is public or private. What is the consensus mechanism? A public truly distributed PoW blockchain is slow and inefficient by design. It's a feature not a bug. A private, permissioned, controlled blockchain is pointless. So I really want to know what are these companies doing when they use blockchain for supposed benefits. Blockchain in supply chain is often the most publicized use case. It somehow assumes that since blockchain is immutable (actually it isn't) whatever you add to it is authentic. Using it for supply chain assumes that a supplier won't lie about the origin or if they employed child labor. Using a blockchain doesn't automatically guarantee any of these.

olliej 5y ago

I do not see anything in this that would not be resolved by a trivial database, and if you read the article that is what they have created: It is a private "blockchain" that only allows trusted participants, so doesn't require all the negative externalities of "blockchain". The only thing "blockchain" about what Walmart has done is riding the absurd investor hype for anything with blockchain in the title.

yashg 5y ago

The article is co-authored by two co-founders of a supply chain management solution company called DLT Labs that uses blockchain somewhere. I checked out their solution on their website. The product looks like any other web app. Is it really using a blockchain somewhere at the backend to store something? May be. It is certainly using some standard RDBMS to store the structured data. There's no way you can store all of that you see in the screenshots on a blockchain. So what it is that is actually being stored on a blockchain? Not clear. Is it possible that they use the word blockchain to get free PR? May be. I don't want to judge. The product page doesn't have the word blockchain anywhere. https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/asset-track https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/asset-track DL Freight, the product used by Walmart Canada also doesn't mention the word blockchain anywhere. There is just one mention of a shared ledger. https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/asset-track/dl-freight https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/asset-track/dl-freight Did find blockchain on this page https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/ecosystem https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/ecosystem But immediately you see this "And because its built using distributed ledger technology, every transaction is 100% auditable, immutable, and visible only to permissioned users – helping to create a genuine layer of trust between the parties that transact on the platform." It refers to permissioned users, so it's not a blockchain. Which is supposed to be permissionless. They aren't even claiming. They are calling it a distributed ledger. In fact I have noticed this even with R3 Corda. The enterprise blockchain provider. They use the term distributed ledger to describe their offering, not blockchain. But all the marketing material and PR pieces always tout blockchain in the headline. If something is permissioned, trustful and centralised, is it even a blockchain?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]