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IBM To Trace Food Contamination With Blockchain (cnbc.com)
Thelasko shares a report from CNBC: IBM has been joined by a group of global food giants including the likes of Nestle, Unilever and Walmart in an effort to reduce food contamination by using blockchain. The corporation announced Tuesday that it would enable global food businesses to use its blockchain network to trace the source of contaminated produce. IBM said that the problem of consumer health suffering at the hands of toxic food could be solved using its distributed ledger technology, which maintains a digital record of transactions rather than a physical one. It would enable food suppliers to source information about the origin, condition and movement of food, and to trace contaminated produce in mere seconds.
It would enable food suppliers to source information about the origin, condition and movement of food, and to trace contaminated produce in mere seconds.
What about us food consumers? Can a brother get a link to a public API?
In Russian whore urine, on videotape. Stupid nazis lol. "Oh he's so smart!" You can't make this shit up.
Will this help with willful contamination? Soy/corn/wheat byproduct are being added into previously non-soy/corn/wheat byproduct items as additives. Some of the time the additives are labeled, sometimes its "natural flavoring".
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
I thought the main point of the blockchain system was to have a decentralized network to prevent customer/user abuse by a central organization.
Why is that relevant here? What's the incentive to run one of these nodes? Is the blockchain method of searching for quasi random hashes really an efficient way verifying transactions?
To me it really sounds like a PR stunt and they're just throwing the word word blockchain to mean "any digitally distributed ledger" which to me sounds like virtually any database system. Might as well call it transparent too? And eco-friendly since there's no paper! Revolutionary blockchain technology...
A blockchain is just a list.
IBM is going to trace food contamination with a list.
How quickly technology used to conceal transactions by criminals became a technology to trace bad stuff.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Looks like blockchain is this year's marketing "it" word, just in time to replace cloud. E.g. "our new word processor is powered by blockchains."
A list that can't be broken, or forged.
Ah yes, Walmart will save millions on ink and double your checkout speed when the cashiers no longer have to update the physical ledger books by hand as you check out...
Serious question: Is there an actual explanation anywhere of how a block chain is supposed to be applied to (and improve) anything other than digital currencies? The video in the article is the best I've seen, and it's technical details amount to "math."
And a blockchain is used for this because?
A few weeks ago their solution would be "Hey Watson, where is the spoiled food?". This company has the attention span of a gnat.
The thing is that the deeper you want to change something the more work you have to do, forging not just the block you want to change, but everything that came on top, too, because the blocks are chained.
The question is, how much work is it to forge one block? In bitcoin, that's quite a lot of work. In the smaller altcoins, much less. And with this initiative? It all depends on just how exactly they run the thing.
So "unforgeable" is not an inherent property, just something you could get if you play your cards right. But if you don't, then the whole thing just doesn't make much of any sense. The devil is very much in the details.
How does food get contaminated with blockchain anyway?
From the blurb:
> IBM has been joined by a group of global food giants including the likes of Nestle, Unilever and Walmart [...]
There, that's our problem. Boundless, unrestricted, depersonalized greed. Enough money to buy *any* lawmaker. Enough money to wage the biggest disinformation war on stupid consumers.
Blockchain sounds cool and appeals to us geeks, but that's just a way for IBM to get some part from the killing.
Corporations: I've been watching this dirty game for too long to believe anything your marketing department vomits on us.
They don't trust each other to store the record, yet they trust each other to make the data that creates the record?
So what does blockchain add to this? IBM?
I think any company is opening itself to litigation if they do this, because IBM are making claims not backed up by their technology, and their contract will dump liabilities onto the customer.
Better to use proper legal escrow if you don't trust your suppliers record keeping and also don't trust your own contemperaneous copy of their records. But then if you don't trust your suppliers and your own staff, but do trust IBM, you have bigger problems.
There will be no more mistaken measurements after the first one.