15 ms·

Maersk/IBM to discontinue TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled global trade platform

274 points by kgwgk 4y ago

tanelpoder 4y ago
"Unfortunately, while we successfully developed a viable platform, the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved." So... they successfully built the solution, but then failed to build a suitable problem for it?
- europeanguy 4y ago
  They built something and turns out that no one wants to use it. Happens all the time. Happens all the time, especially if no one sees a point in using it. In other words, it didn't solve anyone's serious valuable problem. Which is something that those people that have been saying "couldn't you just do the same thing with a database" already knew. Crypto went thru a lot of hype-memes, like NFTs, staking etc etc. But I still remember the older "nonono this is about blockchain as an underlying technology" meme.
- marcus0x62 4y ago
  Perhaps the same thing, but I think they built a solution in search of a problem.
  - HelloNurse 4y ago
    The problem is "producing sticky, heavyweight enterprise IBM products to invoice customers with". This retirement of the product might be more aligned with the expected time between major software replacement initiatives at typical customers than with the hype cycle of blockchains: IBM needs to sell some successor to TradeLens. Or, more simply, Maersk actually needs better software than TradeLens for themselves.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Yup, that's pretty much the question that has bedeviled all blockchain "innovation" since day one. Cryptocurrency still works (for some value of works) because it's self-contained, but as soon as you need to track anything in the real world you run into the oracle problem: how can you trust that what the blockchain says about the world is correct? (Spoiler, you can't.)
- _jal 4y ago
  Yep. The hype cycle at work; if you bamboozle enough people, even skeptics have to commit resources to the latest stupidity. Otherwise you're left without a "blockchain strategy" and the reason-by-checkbox types will think that's a bad thing. Unfortunately, as Gartner has well demonstrated, that's a substantial fraction of the market, so you can't ignore it.
  - tanelpoder 4y ago
    This is a great summary!
mjhay 4y ago
It seems very IBM to build a useless crypto thing with a shipping company.
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  And why not? They still get paid.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
shp0ngle 4y ago
I am not happy for the economic downturn, as lots of people will lose jobs, more people will die of hunger, people will lose their houses. On the other hand there is a silver lining in all the bad… all the useless over hyped techs will finally be seen for what they are
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >lots of people will lose jobs Isn't employment at highest rate ever? At least that's what I keep hearing.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - nosianu 4y ago
    Here in Germany we get yet another "we need much more immigration because of labor shortage" article in the major news media at least every week, I saw even more than that the last two weeks with at least three in Zeit and Spiegel the last week, on the top of the homepage each time. Just today (paywall, German): https://www.zeit.de/politik/2022-12/fachkraefteeinwanderung-bundesregierung-haeufigste-fragen-faq https://www.zeit.de/politik/2022-12/fachkraefteeinwanderung-... -- or https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/iw-studie-fachkraeftemangel-gefaehrdet-energiewende-a-7e3c1c72-c105-4844-9664-d69db9493623 https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/iw-studie-fachkra... Of course, also every time they completely ignore 80% of what the comments say, from individual experiences of qualified people looking for a job to arguments about not seeing any increase in compensation, asking how that can be if there's a market. I myself remember not long ago meeting a young university-qualified engineer with a few years of experiences still having to work for a body-lease shop, moving him between different employers every year, so that they can avoid actually hiring such engineers. Or the bad working conditions in craft jobs, where there really is a large unmet demand, but it's still extremely unattractive to enter this market. I find the lack of any reaction to the overwhelming feedback they get every single time to these articles more than a bit suspicious. They repeat the exact same message without the slightest change. Maybe quoting a different person (always from an employer organization) and using slightly different sentences, not an exact reprint, but definitely the exact content every time. I have no doubt that some companies have trouble finding the right people, but I also have no doubt that there is something seriously wrong on a deeper level. Unfortunately the media are no help trying to shed some light on the deeper and more complex issues.
etothepii 4y ago
The block chain hype has been fascinating. The (practically) immutable nature of a block chain is genuinely fascinating and arguably very novel and new but the only reason everyone got excited was because the value of Bitcoin went to the moon. I assume there is some growth hack idea here somewhere.
- substation13 4y ago
  Indeed. Blockchain is a really clever piece of applied cryptography with very limited real-world use-cases.
  - otabdeveloper4 4y ago
    The real-world use-cases are already covered by git.
    - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
      Not all of them. There are two very specific use cases that it has value as: 1. A decentralised/trust-less "source of truth" for coordination between mutually distrusting parties. This was the "novel" innovation for Bitcoin and it's been refined with the less energy intensive consensus algorithms. Not everything needs this and arguably fairly few things do but for the projects that benefit from trust-less coordination as an option, I'm not sure there's a better alternative yet. 2. As a decentralised marketplace for a given resource. The most common one is the basic cryptocurrency which is a fee market for inclusion in the ledger. Past that however are Storage, Data routing (i.e. VPN or onion routing), and Verifiable Compute (or non-accuracy-critical compute like 3d rendering). Outside of those, I'd also argue it's useful for privacy preserving transactions (like monero, etc) but I know some people will disagree that that's "just for criminals". Don't get me wrong, a lot of cryptocurrency or blockchain projects are practically an abstraction over git or a database but there are a number of very useful things you can do with blockchains that you just can't do with git or a db.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
samwillis 4y ago
Colour me surprised. I don't think I have yet heard of an industrial use of bock chain technology that would not be better and more easily solved with a "traditional" database. There has been so much talk of using it for supply chain tracking and inventory, but it only gives you more problems to solve. Ultimately you need someone to be the "authority" in business transactions, a platform built on a decentralised block chain would still need that for any of these logistics problems. Even when you look at crypto currency use of the block chain, the vast majority of transactions are happening off chain on a traditional database via an exchange.
- subradios 4y ago
  Everything would be better, but nobody would want to build the platform. Supply chain is a cartel industry and the present cartels aren't interested in new entrants.
- qznc 4y ago
  DNS aka NameCoin is still the best use case in my opinion. Even there, the current centralized "everybody trusts ICANN" works well enough. It would require a situation close to WW3 such that China decides to create their own top-level registrar maybe. Then the EU does a third and then the world splits into chaos. Then NameCoin could arise as a neutral viable alternative. Looks very unlikely to me.
college_physics 4y ago
> the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved therein lies the problem of (non-cryptocurrency) blockchain, sometimes phrased as " solution seeking problem". had there been a will for "collaboration" (and in many cases there should be) one does not need to wait for this specific type of algorithmic advance to make it happen: existing databases, cryptography, networks and maybe a few human auditors in the loop would already offer 80/20 solutions. there was always a chance that there is sweet spot, a particular bottleneck that some variation of blockchain would just be the right tool for. apparently that is not the case.
- MBCook 4y ago
  They already trust each other anyway. They have contracts. And you wouldn’t supply shipping containers to Maersk to ship from here to their destination if you didn’t think you could trust them to do it. So centralization would have always worked. At Maersk, or some industry trade group or something. They never needed a blockchain. It was just the cool word of the day to make them hip.
  - mike_hearn 4y ago
    In these platforms key players are often governments and customs/excise offices, so they don't always trust each other no. Trade finance is really complicated largely due to the lack of trust, actually. Banks that deal with it have entire offices devoted to detecting document fraud. The use case and need for better solutions is real, but TradeLens maybe wasn't the platform to achieve it.
    - mumblemumble 4y ago
      These conversations are always so vague that one has to wonder if it's deliberate. I'd love it if the discussion could get more concrete. For example, what's a specific case of international trade fraud that a blockchain could have prevented, and why is a blockchain needed to prevent it?
      - 4y ago
gryf 4y ago
Someone finally realised it was bollocks after enough customers told them it was. I’ve been on a few projects over the years which the outcome was exactly that.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
I'm sure they were handsomely paid by the US and several EU governments to develop something so "innovative" with blockchain. Unfortunately, nobody wanted it before the governments pulled funding.
- tokai 4y ago
  Why would there have been governmental funding? Its a private project by private companies. I can't find anything on outside funding for tradelens. Do you have any source on that?
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    I don't have a source, but IBM likes making sure their R&D has outside funding.
    - tokai 4y ago
      In this case their outside funding was Mærsk.
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
How can that be? By putting paper work in the blockchain they managed to cut shipping times by 40%! https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/ibm-maersk-tradelens-blockchain-alliance-cuts-shipping-times-40-percent/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/ibm-maersk-tradelens... Seriously though I believe the blockchain has always been hidden behind an API hosted by IBM (access to those who got approved and paid a fee), blockchain was an implementation/marketing detail and the whole thing could have been done with Sybase/MDB etc. If they had promoted this as a standard/open way of describing shipping data it might have been beneficial.
- oxfordmale 4y ago
  ...and if IBM says it is 40%, it is definitely true. Just as IBM Watson is going to be the future of healthcare. Unfortunately, that future seems to consist of scrapping IBM Watson and selling it for parts /sarcasm
  - danuker 4y ago
    > /sarcasm You mean, they won't even bother selling it for parts? Or why is this sarcasm?
    - conorcleary 4y ago
      Selling the sarcasm.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        I have plenty, and cynisism, in case someone is interested!
        barking_biscuit 4y ago
        I would take you up on the offer, but I doubt it's geniune :P
    - 4y ago
Zigurd 4y ago
There are fewer than 100 million shipping containers in use today. A database of all of them, their location, their destination, and what they contain is not even "big data." this is a mole hill built into a hype mountain with some crypto jargon.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  So let's see. Back of the envelope math time. Let's round to 100 million containers to make the math simpler. 8 bytes for a synthetic primary key. 8 bytes each also for location and destination, referencing a separate table with information about "places" (e.g. loading docks, port terminals, holds of ships), that should be more than enough distinct IDs to give you as fine-grained location identification as you need. Description, let's say 512 bytes of free text. 8 + 8 + 8 + 512 = 536 bytes, let's say with padding and DB overhead of various kinds we round up to the next power of 2, an even 1kb. 1kb * 100 million is then roughly 100 Gb. Now I am aware of the risk of "why don't they just"-ing, but seriously, nobody else did this math and noticed that the whole database could probably fit on a $15 SD card? No, most likely someone did, and kept their mouth shut, because why blow up a perfectly good grift?
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    While a good bashing, it's not really relevant, is it? It's about collaboration, not absolute size of the data. This comment sounds right: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33802411&goto=threads%3Fid%3Dsuperice%2333802411 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33802411&goto=threads%...
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    That would let you describe the current location of each container, right? Presumably we also want to describe a history of locations and events for each container so we're talking a few additional orders of magnitude more storage and complexity. But still, your point 100% stands. We're not talking about something that traditional technologies can't handle. Although to be fair it seems like the blockchain fans are trumpeting the "publicly available ledger" aspect and not the "suitability for Big Data" angle... I'm no blockchain booster, but I don't think anybody is claiming that it outperforms a trad DB.
dhdgrygev 4y ago
Lol. Last time I said there was no real world use for blockchain tech besides crypto, people put this as a counter example. Look how well that went.
ycombinatornews 4y ago
What happened? /s
danrocks 4y ago
I worked on a project for the biggest airline in SE Asia that was essentially their loyalty platform on the blockchain. The idea was that other airlines would also put their points on the same blockchain and they'd somehow become interchangeable. Except nobody came, and now said airline has a very expensive piece of tech to maintain, built on a service (Azure Blockchain) that has been discontinued. Link: https://www.singaporeair.com/en_UK/es/media-centre/press-release/article/?q=en_UK/2018/January-March/ne0518-180205 https://www.singaporeair.com/en_UK/es/media-centre/press-rel...
- gus_massa 4y ago
  Can they just dump all info to a standard database and close? I guess the users must use their secret key to sign the connection form "anonymous" blockchain address to a normal userid in a database.
monkeydust 4y ago
So a lot of these blockchain projects started around the same time. They have not delivered and as money runs dry they cant get more funding as the economy tightens and heads towards what is probably a short recession. The other high profile blockchain failure was the ASX one reported earlier this month: https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/they-were-building-a-frankenstein-how-asx-s-blockchain-unravelled-20221117-p5bz24 https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/they-were-b... Expect more to follow.
superice 4y ago
As somebody in container shipping: good riddance. There are a handful of sensible people who have been calling this out for years and years, and every time there are wishful thinkers telling them this is the future. The worst of it is that there is an actual business case for a blockchain-like solution, because in flows where the shipper of the goods arranges their own hinterland transportation ("merchant haulage") there is a huge communication gap. The hinterland party and the shipping line need to arrange a handover of the container, and communicate about this constantly, but they are not in direct contact with eachother, because the shipper contracts them independently. T-mining (https://www.t-mining.be/ https://www.t-mining.be/, I'm not associated with them) is solving this for the release rights bit of that issue, but really this problem should be approached much wider to solve for seaship ETA updates and customs documents as well. Crucially, you can't solve this through a trusted third party, firstly because there is none that operates world-wide, and secondly because it would grant enormous power to that party, and no logistical actor is willing to give away this power. Of course the major shipping lines (Maersk, MSC, CMA-CGM) have been pushing to integrate hinterland services in their business more and more, so the shipper won't choose to arrange this themselves to begin with. This means they have no interest in fixing the communication problem. This is okay for shippers in the short term, but long term this will ruin the market. The shipping market is heavily centralized with only a few large players, which will now gain significant control over the hinterland as well and be able to force their policies on inland container depots, barge and train operators, and trucking companies. It's a shame really.
- latchkey 4y ago
  How do you start with 'good riddance' and then end with 'it's a shame really'? It sounds more and more like these people tried to solve social / political problem(s), with technology. Regardless of blockchain or not... it wasn't going to work until they got past the social issues.
  - ArchD 4y ago
    He means the blockchain application in TFA is bullshit but the other situation he described regarding hinterland transportation is one that could benefit from a proper decentralized blockchain system but there is no such system.
nathias 4y ago
the problem is not the blockchain it's IBM
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  The problem is the same as it's been the whole time: the people who buy tech, and who have the authority to start tech initiatives, don't understand the technology and don't care to. So they chase fads and shiny objects.
  - acdha 4y ago
    It’s more fundamental than that: this is what happens when you do something based on fear of being left out. Consulting companies like Gartner were heavily pushing blockchains half a decade ago, and even if they can’t convey a concrete benefit for something there will be some fraction of listeners who think that they need to buy some and hope it’s useful because they’re afraid of being asked why they didn’t in a few years. It’s the high production values version of the salespeople who’ve shown up here for years saying crypto is the future and you’re old and obsolete if you don’t buy whatever they’re selling. This same dynamic shows up in other areas - e.g. big data, AI, security – but blockchains are an outlier in terms of how little value the technology provides. A lot of big data / AI projects didn’t deliver the huge win promised but turned out to be a good umbrella for getting funding to clean up a ton of data and processing, for example.
cirgue 4y ago
All of this talk about IBM being incompetent is completely undeserved. They are probably the best in the business at selling nonsense to gullible executives.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  IBM stands for Internalize Barnum's Maxim. Referring, of course, to a saying often attributed to P. T. Barnum, "There's a sucker born every minute."
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  They used to make really good typewriters...
tokai 4y ago
Weirdly they are stilling hiring developers. https://www.tradelens.com/careers https://www.tradelens.com/careers
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  Someone forgot to turn off the lights, probably. Or maybe, maybe, they actually need some hands to migrate stuff onto some other solution.
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
> Unfortunately, while we successfully developed a viable platform Translation: "The prototype kind of worked..." > the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved. As a result, TradeLens has not reached the level of commercial viability necessary to continue work and meet the financial expectations as an independent business. "...but only then did we find out nobody cared."
chanakya 4y ago
The blockchain continues to be a solution looking for a problem.
kumarvvr 4y ago
Shocking ! That actual money was spent by actual people who put it on blockchain. And to solve exactly what problem that traditional data systems could not solve?
rawicki 4y ago
I always understood that TradeLens is something that could be built with a simple database but they used Blockchain to hype up potential partners to sign up. I’d expect to see at least some of these cynical solutions actually work in practice. So interesting they decided to shut it down, instead of just walking back the blockchain part.
- chris_wot 4y ago
  The Australian stick-exchange came to the exact same conclusion and scrapped their own blockchain solution. It was always a stupid idea.
- scld 4y ago
  Mostly because it's not the blockchain part that was hurting the project.
surfingdino 4y ago
Global shipping is one of those industries that are yet to discover APIs. They are currently in awe of FTP and XML for EDI though the way they use it is to stuff as much as possible into the general catch-all tags, because they cannot agree on the schemas. It's the land of mainframes, T-SQL, Excel, and CSV. I have worked with those global players and the way they run IT project is appalling. Blockchain is way too futuristic for them and they kinda miss faxes. People who genuinely want to change things are frustrated, because no matter how modern their own solution are they have to build integrations that work with something put together thirty years ago, undocumented, and without any guidance or help from the incumbent who then proceeds to not sign off on the project and forces the partner to use the old document flows. Worry not, there will be between 5 and 7 developers in each meeting and the integrator's developers are not allowed to talk directly with the incumbent's developers. I promised myself to never work with those guys again.
- m00dy 4y ago
  yes, because it is not a competitive industry. A bunch of families dominating the whole industry.
  - duxup 4y ago
    Naw man the whole industry is generally backwards. It's not one or two companies.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      So backwards that basically everyones lifelyhood can depend on it. So, job well done, one could say.
- gbro3n 4y ago
  The problem of old technologies isn't specific to the shipping industry, this is true for many large, long running industries where working systems matter. You see old technologies in banking and you see it in transport for example. Shipping has a better fitting use case for blockchain than many industries due to interoperability with third parties and the need for tracking and auditing. Maersk won't have bet the farm on this, I'd be inclined to see it as leading a forward looking experimentation with new technologies that hasn't panned out.
lencastre 4y ago
I was just reading about them in the Levine article on Bloomberg. I want to make a joke about NFT containers but it’s beating a dead horse.
givemeethekeys 4y ago
I keep getting the feeling that IBM is a con operation. They piggyback onto the latest fad and advertise how they can solve things with it, but keep failing to produce meaningful things.. and then they blame the fad for it.
- wepple 4y ago
  100% The phrase used to be “nobody got fired for buying IBM” These days IBM sell so much snake oil, I think heads should roll whenever someone purchases whatever fad-hype-junk IBM is touting and it turns out to be nonsense
yalogin 4y ago
The whole blockchain market is just trying to find a problem to fit their solution. I haven't seen a use case that actually is benefitted by it yet. There could be marginal advantages but that would mean they need to convince someone (practically a lot of parties) to adopt that solution so it achieves critical mass and people think of it as a natural thing. That is very tough to happen and a recession is bad for that adoption. It will be interesting to see how blockchain businesses pan out.
aryehof 4y ago
What amazes me is that large established organizations are just as susceptible to fad and hype as an uninformed layman. Then again, many a CIO I’ve worked with could be at least labeled as uninformed, or largely informed by those selling their silver-bullet products and services.

274 points by kgwgk 4y ago

"Unfortunately, while we successfully developed a viable platform, the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved." So... they successfully built the solution, but then failed to build a suitable problem for it?

europeanguy 4y ago
They built something and turns out that no one wants to use it. Happens all the time. Happens all the time, especially if no one sees a point in using it. In other words, it didn't solve anyone's serious valuable problem. Which is something that those people that have been saying "couldn't you just do the same thing with a database" already knew. Crypto went thru a lot of hype-memes, like NFTs, staking etc etc. But I still remember the older "nonono this is about blockchain as an underlying technology" meme.
marcus0x62 4y ago
Perhaps the same thing, but I think they built a solution in search of a problem.
- HelloNurse 4y ago
  The problem is "producing sticky, heavyweight enterprise IBM products to invoice customers with". This retirement of the product might be more aligned with the expected time between major software replacement initiatives at typical customers than with the hype cycle of blockchains: IBM needs to sell some successor to TradeLens. Or, more simply, Maersk actually needs better software than TradeLens for themselves.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rippercushions 4y ago
Yup, that's pretty much the question that has bedeviled all blockchain "innovation" since day one. Cryptocurrency still works (for some value of works) because it's self-contained, but as soon as you need to track anything in the real world you run into the oracle problem: how can you trust that what the blockchain says about the world is correct? (Spoiler, you can't.)
_jal 4y ago
Yep. The hype cycle at work; if you bamboozle enough people, even skeptics have to commit resources to the latest stupidity. Otherwise you're left without a "blockchain strategy" and the reason-by-checkbox types will think that's a bad thing. Unfortunately, as Gartner has well demonstrated, that's a substantial fraction of the market, so you can't ignore it.
- tanelpoder 4y ago
  This is a great summary!

mjhay 4y ago

It seems very IBM to build a useless crypto thing with a shipping company.

NotYourLawyer 4y ago
And why not? They still get paid.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

shp0ngle 4y ago

I am not happy for the economic downturn, as lots of people will lose jobs, more people will die of hunger, people will lose their houses. On the other hand there is a silver lining in all the bad… all the useless over hyped techs will finally be seen for what they are

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>lots of people will lose jobs Isn't employment at highest rate ever? At least that's what I keep hearing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nosianu 4y ago
  Here in Germany we get yet another "we need much more immigration because of labor shortage" article in the major news media at least every week, I saw even more than that the last two weeks with at least three in Zeit and Spiegel the last week, on the top of the homepage each time. Just today (paywall, German): https://www.zeit.de/politik/2022-12/fachkraefteeinwanderung-bundesregierung-haeufigste-fragen-faq https://www.zeit.de/politik/2022-12/fachkraefteeinwanderung-... -- or https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/iw-studie-fachkraeftemangel-gefaehrdet-energiewende-a-7e3c1c72-c105-4844-9664-d69db9493623 https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/iw-studie-fachkra... Of course, also every time they completely ignore 80% of what the comments say, from individual experiences of qualified people looking for a job to arguments about not seeing any increase in compensation, asking how that can be if there's a market. I myself remember not long ago meeting a young university-qualified engineer with a few years of experiences still having to work for a body-lease shop, moving him between different employers every year, so that they can avoid actually hiring such engineers. Or the bad working conditions in craft jobs, where there really is a large unmet demand, but it's still extremely unattractive to enter this market. I find the lack of any reaction to the overwhelming feedback they get every single time to these articles more than a bit suspicious. They repeat the exact same message without the slightest change. Maybe quoting a different person (always from an employer organization) and using slightly different sentences, not an exact reprint, but definitely the exact content every time. I have no doubt that some companies have trouble finding the right people, but I also have no doubt that there is something seriously wrong on a deeper level. Unfortunately the media are no help trying to shed some light on the deeper and more complex issues.

etothepii 4y ago

The block chain hype has been fascinating. The (practically) immutable nature of a block chain is genuinely fascinating and arguably very novel and new but the only reason everyone got excited was because the value of Bitcoin went to the moon. I assume there is some growth hack idea here somewhere.

substation13 4y ago
Indeed. Blockchain is a really clever piece of applied cryptography with very limited real-world use-cases.
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  The real-world use-cases are already covered by git.
  - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
    Not all of them. There are two very specific use cases that it has value as: 1. A decentralised/trust-less "source of truth" for coordination between mutually distrusting parties. This was the "novel" innovation for Bitcoin and it's been refined with the less energy intensive consensus algorithms. Not everything needs this and arguably fairly few things do but for the projects that benefit from trust-less coordination as an option, I'm not sure there's a better alternative yet. 2. As a decentralised marketplace for a given resource. The most common one is the basic cryptocurrency which is a fee market for inclusion in the ledger. Past that however are Storage, Data routing (i.e. VPN or onion routing), and Verifiable Compute (or non-accuracy-critical compute like 3d rendering). Outside of those, I'd also argue it's useful for privacy preserving transactions (like monero, etc) but I know some people will disagree that that's "just for criminals". Don't get me wrong, a lot of cryptocurrency or blockchain projects are practically an abstraction over git or a database but there are a number of very useful things you can do with blockchains that you just can't do with git or a db.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago

samwillis 4y ago

Colour me surprised. I don't think I have yet heard of an industrial use of bock chain technology that would not be better and more easily solved with a "traditional" database. There has been so much talk of using it for supply chain tracking and inventory, but it only gives you more problems to solve. Ultimately you need someone to be the "authority" in business transactions, a platform built on a decentralised block chain would still need that for any of these logistics problems. Even when you look at crypto currency use of the block chain, the vast majority of transactions are happening off chain on a traditional database via an exchange.

subradios 4y ago
Everything would be better, but nobody would want to build the platform. Supply chain is a cartel industry and the present cartels aren't interested in new entrants.
qznc 4y ago
DNS aka NameCoin is still the best use case in my opinion. Even there, the current centralized "everybody trusts ICANN" works well enough. It would require a situation close to WW3 such that China decides to create their own top-level registrar maybe. Then the EU does a third and then the world splits into chaos. Then NameCoin could arise as a neutral viable alternative. Looks very unlikely to me.

college_physics 4y ago

> the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved therein lies the problem of (non-cryptocurrency) blockchain, sometimes phrased as " solution seeking problem". had there been a will for "collaboration" (and in many cases there should be) one does not need to wait for this specific type of algorithmic advance to make it happen: existing databases, cryptography, networks and maybe a few human auditors in the loop would already offer 80/20 solutions. there was always a chance that there is sweet spot, a particular bottleneck that some variation of blockchain would just be the right tool for. apparently that is not the case.

MBCook 4y ago
They already trust each other anyway. They have contracts. And you wouldn’t supply shipping containers to Maersk to ship from here to their destination if you didn’t think you could trust them to do it. So centralization would have always worked. At Maersk, or some industry trade group or something. They never needed a blockchain. It was just the cool word of the day to make them hip.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  In these platforms key players are often governments and customs/excise offices, so they don't always trust each other no. Trade finance is really complicated largely due to the lack of trust, actually. Banks that deal with it have entire offices devoted to detecting document fraud. The use case and need for better solutions is real, but TradeLens maybe wasn't the platform to achieve it.
  - mumblemumble 4y ago
    These conversations are always so vague that one has to wonder if it's deliberate. I'd love it if the discussion could get more concrete. For example, what's a specific case of international trade fraud that a blockchain could have prevented, and why is a blockchain needed to prevent it?
    - 4y ago

gryf 4y ago

Someone finally realised it was bollocks after enough customers told them it was. I’ve been on a few projects over the years which the outcome was exactly that.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

I'm sure they were handsomely paid by the US and several EU governments to develop something so "innovative" with blockchain. Unfortunately, nobody wanted it before the governments pulled funding.

tokai 4y ago
Why would there have been governmental funding? Its a private project by private companies. I can't find anything on outside funding for tradelens. Do you have any source on that?
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I don't have a source, but IBM likes making sure their R&D has outside funding.
  - tokai 4y ago
    In this case their outside funding was Mærsk.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

How can that be? By putting paper work in the blockchain they managed to cut shipping times by 40%! https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/ibm-maersk-tradelens-blockchain-alliance-cuts-shipping-times-40-percent/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/ibm-maersk-tradelens... Seriously though I believe the blockchain has always been hidden behind an API hosted by IBM (access to those who got approved and paid a fee), blockchain was an implementation/marketing detail and the whole thing could have been done with Sybase/MDB etc. If they had promoted this as a standard/open way of describing shipping data it might have been beneficial.

oxfordmale 4y ago
...and if IBM says it is 40%, it is definitely true. Just as IBM Watson is going to be the future of healthcare. Unfortunately, that future seems to consist of scrapping IBM Watson and selling it for parts /sarcasm
- danuker 4y ago
  > /sarcasm You mean, they won't even bother selling it for parts? Or why is this sarcasm?
  - conorcleary 4y ago
    Selling the sarcasm.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      I have plenty, and cynisism, in case someone is interested!
      - barking_biscuit 4y ago
        I would take you up on the offer, but I doubt it's geniune :P
  - 4y ago

Zigurd 4y ago

There are fewer than 100 million shipping containers in use today. A database of all of them, their location, their destination, and what they contain is not even "big data." this is a mole hill built into a hype mountain with some crypto jargon.

ElfinTrousers 4y ago
So let's see. Back of the envelope math time. Let's round to 100 million containers to make the math simpler. 8 bytes for a synthetic primary key. 8 bytes each also for location and destination, referencing a separate table with information about "places" (e.g. loading docks, port terminals, holds of ships), that should be more than enough distinct IDs to give you as fine-grained location identification as you need. Description, let's say 512 bytes of free text. 8 + 8 + 8 + 512 = 536 bytes, let's say with padding and DB overhead of various kinds we round up to the next power of 2, an even 1kb. 1kb * 100 million is then roughly 100 Gb. Now I am aware of the risk of "why don't they just"-ing, but seriously, nobody else did this math and noticed that the whole database could probably fit on a $15 SD card? No, most likely someone did, and kept their mouth shut, because why blow up a perfectly good grift?
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  While a good bashing, it's not really relevant, is it? It's about collaboration, not absolute size of the data. This comment sounds right: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33802411&goto=threads%3Fid%3Dsuperice%2333802411 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33802411&goto=threads%...
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  That would let you describe the current location of each container, right? Presumably we also want to describe a history of locations and events for each container so we're talking a few additional orders of magnitude more storage and complexity. But still, your point 100% stands. We're not talking about something that traditional technologies can't handle. Although to be fair it seems like the blockchain fans are trumpeting the "publicly available ledger" aspect and not the "suitability for Big Data" angle... I'm no blockchain booster, but I don't think anybody is claiming that it outperforms a trad DB.

dhdgrygev 4y ago

Lol. Last time I said there was no real world use for blockchain tech besides crypto, people put this as a counter example. Look how well that went.

ycombinatornews 4y ago

What happened? /s

danrocks 4y ago

I worked on a project for the biggest airline in SE Asia that was essentially their loyalty platform on the blockchain. The idea was that other airlines would also put their points on the same blockchain and they'd somehow become interchangeable. Except nobody came, and now said airline has a very expensive piece of tech to maintain, built on a service (Azure Blockchain) that has been discontinued. Link: https://www.singaporeair.com/en_UK/es/media-centre/press-release/article/?q=en_UK/2018/January-March/ne0518-180205 https://www.singaporeair.com/en_UK/es/media-centre/press-rel...

gus_massa 4y ago
Can they just dump all info to a standard database and close? I guess the users must use their secret key to sign the connection form "anonymous" blockchain address to a normal userid in a database.

monkeydust 4y ago

So a lot of these blockchain projects started around the same time. They have not delivered and as money runs dry they cant get more funding as the economy tightens and heads towards what is probably a short recession. The other high profile blockchain failure was the ASX one reported earlier this month: https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/they-were-building-a-frankenstein-how-asx-s-blockchain-unravelled-20221117-p5bz24 https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/they-were-b... Expect more to follow.

superice 4y ago

As somebody in container shipping: good riddance. There are a handful of sensible people who have been calling this out for years and years, and every time there are wishful thinkers telling them this is the future. The worst of it is that there is an actual business case for a blockchain-like solution, because in flows where the shipper of the goods arranges their own hinterland transportation ("merchant haulage") there is a huge communication gap. The hinterland party and the shipping line need to arrange a handover of the container, and communicate about this constantly, but they are not in direct contact with eachother, because the shipper contracts them independently. T-mining (https://www.t-mining.be/ https://www.t-mining.be/, I'm not associated with them) is solving this for the release rights bit of that issue, but really this problem should be approached much wider to solve for seaship ETA updates and customs documents as well. Crucially, you can't solve this through a trusted third party, firstly because there is none that operates world-wide, and secondly because it would grant enormous power to that party, and no logistical actor is willing to give away this power. Of course the major shipping lines (Maersk, MSC, CMA-CGM) have been pushing to integrate hinterland services in their business more and more, so the shipper won't choose to arrange this themselves to begin with. This means they have no interest in fixing the communication problem. This is okay for shippers in the short term, but long term this will ruin the market. The shipping market is heavily centralized with only a few large players, which will now gain significant control over the hinterland as well and be able to force their policies on inland container depots, barge and train operators, and trucking companies. It's a shame really.

latchkey 4y ago
How do you start with 'good riddance' and then end with 'it's a shame really'? It sounds more and more like these people tried to solve social / political problem(s), with technology. Regardless of blockchain or not... it wasn't going to work until they got past the social issues.
- ArchD 4y ago
  He means the blockchain application in TFA is bullshit but the other situation he described regarding hinterland transportation is one that could benefit from a proper decentralized blockchain system but there is no such system.

nathias 4y ago

the problem is not the blockchain it's IBM

ElfinTrousers 4y ago
The problem is the same as it's been the whole time: the people who buy tech, and who have the authority to start tech initiatives, don't understand the technology and don't care to. So they chase fads and shiny objects.
- acdha 4y ago
  It’s more fundamental than that: this is what happens when you do something based on fear of being left out. Consulting companies like Gartner were heavily pushing blockchains half a decade ago, and even if they can’t convey a concrete benefit for something there will be some fraction of listeners who think that they need to buy some and hope it’s useful because they’re afraid of being asked why they didn’t in a few years. It’s the high production values version of the salespeople who’ve shown up here for years saying crypto is the future and you’re old and obsolete if you don’t buy whatever they’re selling. This same dynamic shows up in other areas - e.g. big data, AI, security – but blockchains are an outlier in terms of how little value the technology provides. A lot of big data / AI projects didn’t deliver the huge win promised but turned out to be a good umbrella for getting funding to clean up a ton of data and processing, for example.

cirgue 4y ago

All of this talk about IBM being incompetent is completely undeserved. They are probably the best in the business at selling nonsense to gullible executives.

ElfinTrousers 4y ago
IBM stands for Internalize Barnum's Maxim. Referring, of course, to a saying often attributed to P. T. Barnum, "There's a sucker born every minute."
SoftTalker 4y ago
They used to make really good typewriters...

tokai 4y ago

Weirdly they are stilling hiring developers. https://www.tradelens.com/careers https://www.tradelens.com/careers

actionfromafar 4y ago
Someone forgot to turn off the lights, probably. Or maybe, maybe, they actually need some hands to migrate stuff onto some other solution.

ElfinTrousers 4y ago

> Unfortunately, while we successfully developed a viable platform Translation: "The prototype kind of worked..." > the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved. As a result, TradeLens has not reached the level of commercial viability necessary to continue work and meet the financial expectations as an independent business. "...but only then did we find out nobody cared."

chanakya 4y ago

The blockchain continues to be a solution looking for a problem.

kumarvvr 4y ago

Shocking ! That actual money was spent by actual people who put it on blockchain. And to solve exactly what problem that traditional data systems could not solve?

rawicki 4y ago

I always understood that TradeLens is something that could be built with a simple database but they used Blockchain to hype up potential partners to sign up. I’d expect to see at least some of these cynical solutions actually work in practice. So interesting they decided to shut it down, instead of just walking back the blockchain part.

chris_wot 4y ago
The Australian stick-exchange came to the exact same conclusion and scrapped their own blockchain solution. It was always a stupid idea.
scld 4y ago
Mostly because it's not the blockchain part that was hurting the project.

surfingdino 4y ago

Global shipping is one of those industries that are yet to discover APIs. They are currently in awe of FTP and XML for EDI though the way they use it is to stuff as much as possible into the general catch-all tags, because they cannot agree on the schemas. It's the land of mainframes, T-SQL, Excel, and CSV. I have worked with those global players and the way they run IT project is appalling. Blockchain is way too futuristic for them and they kinda miss faxes. People who genuinely want to change things are frustrated, because no matter how modern their own solution are they have to build integrations that work with something put together thirty years ago, undocumented, and without any guidance or help from the incumbent who then proceeds to not sign off on the project and forces the partner to use the old document flows. Worry not, there will be between 5 and 7 developers in each meeting and the integrator's developers are not allowed to talk directly with the incumbent's developers. I promised myself to never work with those guys again.

m00dy 4y ago
yes, because it is not a competitive industry. A bunch of families dominating the whole industry.
- duxup 4y ago
  Naw man the whole industry is generally backwards. It's not one or two companies.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    So backwards that basically everyones lifelyhood can depend on it. So, job well done, one could say.
gbro3n 4y ago
The problem of old technologies isn't specific to the shipping industry, this is true for many large, long running industries where working systems matter. You see old technologies in banking and you see it in transport for example. Shipping has a better fitting use case for blockchain than many industries due to interoperability with third parties and the need for tracking and auditing. Maersk won't have bet the farm on this, I'd be inclined to see it as leading a forward looking experimentation with new technologies that hasn't panned out.

lencastre 4y ago

I was just reading about them in the Levine article on Bloomberg. I want to make a joke about NFT containers but it’s beating a dead horse.

givemeethekeys 4y ago

I keep getting the feeling that IBM is a con operation. They piggyback onto the latest fad and advertise how they can solve things with it, but keep failing to produce meaningful things.. and then they blame the fad for it.

wepple 4y ago
100% The phrase used to be “nobody got fired for buying IBM” These days IBM sell so much snake oil, I think heads should roll whenever someone purchases whatever fad-hype-junk IBM is touting and it turns out to be nonsense

yalogin 4y ago

The whole blockchain market is just trying to find a problem to fit their solution. I haven't seen a use case that actually is benefitted by it yet. There could be marginal advantages but that would mean they need to convince someone (practically a lot of parties) to adopt that solution so it achieves critical mass and people think of it as a natural thing. That is very tough to happen and a recession is bad for that adoption. It will be interesting to see how blockchain businesses pan out.

aryehof 4y ago

What amazes me is that large established organizations are just as susceptible to fad and hype as an uninformed layman. Then again, many a CIO I’ve worked with could be at least labeled as uninformed, or largely informed by those selling their silver-bullet products and services.