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IBM Completes Blockchain Trial Tracking a 28-Ton Shipment of Oranges (coindesk.com)
IBM recently completed a trial of blockchain technology to track a shipment of mandarin oranges from China to Singapore. From a report: Announced last week, 28 tons of mandarin oranges, or 3,000 cartons containing approximately 108,000 fruits, were delivered ahead of Chinese New Year celebration on Feb. 5 (mandarin oranges are a symbol of prosperity, IBM explained). The main shipping document, the bill of lading, was recorded on a blockchain. This document serves as a proof of ownership of goods, as a receipt of goods and a contract of the shipment, and normally it's mailed to all parties involved in the shipment, including banks providing trade financing.
For the pilot, IBM created an electronic bill of lading, or e-BL, which helped reduce and speed up administrative processes "to just one second" as the document flow is automated, the company claims -- while the standard paper-based procedure takes five to seven days. "By using the e-BL, we have seen how the entire shipment process can be simplified and made more transparent with considerable cost savings," Tay Khiam Back, the chairman and CEO of fruit importer Hupco, said in a press release.
For the pilot, IBM created an electronic bill of lading, or e-BL, which helped reduce and speed up administrative processes "to just one second" as the document flow is automated, the company claims -- while the standard paper-based procedure takes five to seven days. "By using the e-BL, we have seen how the entire shipment process can be simplified and made more transparent with considerable cost savings," Tay Khiam Back, the chairman and CEO of fruit importer Hupco, said in a press release.
Only if you think Consensus beats Authenticity. I'd somehow feel safer having signed documents where I can verify the digital signature, and trust the certificate chain. Even if the parties pre-arrange to use self-signed certificates.
Or maybe use the Consensus approach to Generate your self signed certificate, thus avoiding any CAs. That is a lot less computational work and waste of resources. You only generate your certificate occasionally. But you could use it to sign much more frequently.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
block chains either have to go to a central authority or they have to be distributed among a limited set of nodes that that sync to maintain the longest chain.
If you want it to be secure then I think that you either have to use a very expensive hash and pay the Miner (like bit coin proof of work) or you have to limit this to a distributed set of miner nodes that use a shared secret.
one of the other has to be in place I think because otherwise anyone coutd forge the chain if it's free to hash and not a closed set of trustee nodes.
Since were talking oranges , individually, then you need the cheap method with a centrally authorized set of approver nodes.
But if you are going to have such a centralized authority. Why not a regular old fashioned database?
I just don't understand what is special here about the block chain.
It does have some robust aspects of syncronizing a distributed set of approver nodes by consensus (longest chain wins). But that isn't really special and can be done with databases that synchronize too.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
And in this case, the weakness will be linking the blockchain to the physical goods. Anyone can still crack open the container and steal oranges during transit. A drug smuggler can still swap a shipment of oranges with a shipment of drugs by switching the labels. And the delivery guy can still take a snapshot of your package on your porch as "proof" it was delivered, then load it back up into his van and take it home.
Basically, the rest of the world is going to start recording their transactions in git repositories.
It provides compounded verification and cryptographic authentication (e.g. commit signing).
However, nobody would understand "IBM completes Git trial". In fact, people might be offended. The cool word is "blockchain".
doesn't cost enough to justify IBM using it.
How does a blockchain entirely owned by one company (IBM) guarantee the transaction an immutable transaction history? Is the code open source and available to be run / scrutinised by others?
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
because cloud... er i mean blockchain
I can easily imagine that a heavily-stage-managed and custom documentation process would be way faster than the lowest-common-denominator legacy paper arrangement; but I find it much harder to understand why the 'blockchain' based updated electronic records process would be faster or more efficient than a similarly updated electronic records process that's based on some boring database instead.
It's easy to compare updated processes against legacy ones and get good results(especially given that there are probably way more techs watching this order and making sure nothing bad happens than any normal one enjoys); but if you want 'blockchain' data what matters is how it stacks up to a similarly updated process that uses a different backing mechanism.
I'd also be curious about how this beats the 'garbage in/garbage out' problem: Blockchain storage makes it very tricky to munge records after the fact without being noticed; but have absolutely no effect on any of the steps where someone needs to accurately and honestly observe the state of the world at a given step and write that into the record. The fun cryptographic integrity doesn't kick in until you have the electronic record; the process by which that record is produced is unaffected; and where a variety of opportunities for adding lies present themselves.
Isn't this just an electronic document? Couldn't you just put a QR code on the containers that linked to a copy of all the paperwork online, or fire a trigger that good have been received? Once the code is scanned at its destination an email of the documents are sent to all parties that the good have been received. You also log the ip address of the device making the web request as proof that it was done on the dock (or receiving warehouse, maybe include a pin that has to be entered as well).
If you wanted every party to sign off, you could make those e-mails instead link to a document management system that as each email link is clicked you record the party has seen the document, and you give them a simple "accept"/"deny" links to click. I seem to remember Sharepoint having something like this. Why the need for blockchain? Seems like they created a convoluted way of using blockchain so they could say blockchain.
It doesn't. Blockchain is one of the most over hyped technologies of the last two decades. There are some things where it might be useful but most of the time these companies are just using where a standard database would work just as well. Sometimes better. This is one of those times.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
You can't go back and forge early documents at a later point.
You can't go into the DB and just decide to edit a port of origin as all of the metadata that goes into a record also depends on all of the metadata prior to it.
Give me root access to your databases and I'll make your products show up from anywhere in the world. What happens when Orange company gets sold and Orange2, Inc wants to scrub any incriminating data showing Oranges from region X caused cancer? Edit the database.
If you can figure out how to Edit the blockchain you'll be richer doing that than bothering with oranges.
The Bill Of Lading Electronic Registry Organization (BOLERO) has been allowing shipping companies to use electronic, cryptographically secured bills of lading for more than 20 years. Unfortunately they don't use !!!BLOCKCHAIN!!!, so obviously the IBM solution is the only real alternative to using paper Bills of Lading.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
From melamine? Possibly.
Ezekiel 23:20
I suppose the question is how much corruption/fraud requires a party to go back and modify records rather than falsifying them in the first place.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
For their next demonstration they are going to track a shipment of apples (the fruit). This will allow them to claim that chain has conclusively proved that you really can compare apples to oranges. (The next press release.)
I'm sorry the 90s called and they want their "e" back.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
mandarin oranges are a symbol of prosperity, IBM explained
That needs to be explained? By IBM?
Everything is a "symbol of prosperity" in Chinese culture. There isn't anything in Chinese culture that doesn't come down to being about wanting to have lots of money.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
ROFD beats Blockchain every time. Regular Old Fucking Database.
Trusting the group means trusting whoever has enough compute power to manipulate the blockchain.
On the web you have people that don't trust each other but trust central certificate authorities -- more or less.
Or, what if you used blockchain to sign your certificates, and then used certificates that others would trust because they trust the group that your certificate is really yours? This costs a whole lot less compute power.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
It only delivered "approximately" 108,000 fruits.
but if I had to make a wild guess I'd say it lets them offload some of the database processing to external "nodes", e.g. to another company.
Think about how much computer time costs for a large database. Now imagine if you could shift that cost to somebody else...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
....and we've been using express B/Ls (ie no originals "mailed" anywhere) since you had to fax them before email was a widespread thing.
When original docs are required, ie for a letter of credit, they still use consigned BLs to really they're docs that bottleneck the PAYMENT chain, not so much the goods at all.
As far as proof of ownership, perhaps some people use them in sketchy parts of the world, but "to order" BLs that *actually* are a negotiable title to the goods...I haven't seen one in at least 20 years. Otherwise all transactions are consigned bills of lading in which case title is transferred to the consignee according to the Incoterms.
Short version: this is a complex solution to something that's not a problem, and solves nothing (that I can see) that IS a problem in this business space.
-Styopa
"...For the pilot, IBM created an electronic bill of lading, or e-BL, which helped reduce and speed up administrative processes âoeto just one secondâ as the document flow is automated, the company claims â" while the standard paper-based procedure takes five to seven days...."
Um, BLs are required to be produced within 48 hours of sailing, and that's been the standard since at least the 1980s. Usually it's less than that, and in fact with the implementation of ISF carriers are forced to issue BL numbers (the key bit) BEFORE THE VESSEL HAS EVEN SAILED (ISF is only relevant to the US, but I believe this process has ended up speeding BL# issuance worldwide anyway).
And a vanishingly small % of any shipments are issued with paper BL's anyway. I haven't seen a BL in the MAIL for 15+ years.
-Styopa
OK, so they created an e-BL and stored it on a blockchain. Whoopee, I can do that with my toy Multichain setup in 30 seconds. Now what?
How many participants were on that blockchain? Was the transfer of custody of the oranges recorded via asset transfer on that blockchain each step of the way? Was the e-BL used as a contract document by legal entities who received it via the blockchain, and did a bank connected to the blockchain use it as proof of collateral, as the article implies?
Because there have been a lot of big-name exercises in practical applications of Blockchain which then turned out to be a single node using it as a simple database, like the much-ballyhooed World Food Program blockchain exercise did.
Shared infrastructure means less operational cost for each parties involved in supply chain.
There is a lot of difference between a blockchain consortium among a fixed set of semi-trusted parties, and a centralized database.
In the former, the parties trust each other, but only as far as they can throw each other. The network is full of competitors and those who could see substantial if fraudulent transactions could occur in their favour.
This is why Blockchain has a large advantage over a central database for this kind of scenario - not only are all the transactions on the chain and immutable, the code that operates the chain, is on the chain itself - which means that all parties on the chain have to agree to any code changes around the transactions, which means they know no one is messing with anything without everyone else knowing about it. You can't do this kind of scenario with a central database.
Yup, if the nodes in the blockchain are all controlled by a single entity, an ROFD would do. Or maybe just a text file & notepad.
The problem blockchains solve is one of distrusting peers having a way to perform trust-able transactions with a trust-able transaction history. If you remove the "distrusting peers" part, surprisingly, you end up with untrustable transactions and transaction history.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
Sure you can. You can write whatever you want in a block chain. The only restriction is that to make everything line up, you have to recompute the hashes for all the subsequent blocks. Thatâ(TM)s not hard either.
Now, if you publicize the data, someone might catch you doing it. Just like they would if you published a blog entry or tweet you regretted and deleted it.
Block chains arenâ(TM)t magic.
Just wait until someone figures out a way to combine AI and blockchain! Then you're going to hear hype.