
Walmart Is Getting Suppliers to Put Food on the Blockchain - rbanffy
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/walmart-is-getting-suppliers-to-put-food-on-blockchain-to-track
======
thisisit
Every time we have a story like this, every time I ask - how does this work on
a blockchain? Many people will talk about blockchain trustless-ness and how
this doesn't requires trust etc. And I ask give me an end to end example of
what are the trust issues here and how does blockchain solve it? I have yet to
get a concrete answer.

So, again what trust issues does blockchain solve?

To ensure we are not talking about completely abstract things let's take a
real life example. Here's an issue:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-welspun-india-walmart-
idU...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-welspun-india-walmart-
idUSKCN11G02A)

 _Wal-Mart Stores Inc on Friday said it will stop selling Egyptian cotton
sheets made by Welspun India after the Indian manufacturer was unable to
assure them the products were authentic._

How does blockchain help?

~~~
noddy1
An olive farm makes some extra virgin olive oil in Italy. It is recorded at
some date. They also make some virgin and some regular olive oil. It gets put
in bottles and shipped somewhere. The shipping info is linked to the original
production entry on the blockchain. An IOT device in the shipping load adds an
entry to the blockchain saying that that it hasnt gone above or below some
range of temperatures. It finally reaches a wholesale destination. At this
point, it could go to a number of companies. In this case, any buyer could
verify: 1) That an entry was made that this was extra virgin 2) that the olive
farm is also making appropriate quantities of virgin and non-virgin olive oil
- eg. not just labeling all of it extra virgin 3) where and when the shipping
company picked up the olive oil from that farm 4) that this olive oil was
transported in appropriate conditions

These are all timestamped, impossible to alter, and would require an elaborate
planned fraud between a number of parties to fake.

How would you do this without blockchain? with a trusted 3rd party. Who can
you trust when you are involving the russian govt, chinese govt, and US govt,
and EU, and corrupt italian public servants? none of those groups trust any of
the other parties completely.

~~~
bildung
Could you eaborate how any trust problem is solved here?

Points 1 and two aren't solved in any way, as the buyer has to trust the
producer to not lie when making the entry. In other words, the trust problem
here occurs before entry into the database.

Point 4 is already solved with by a multitude of companies selling those
temperature-sensible stickers (and adding/removing the stickers is the same
vulnerability as adding/removing the iot device).

BTW, with a blockchain solution, these are not at all "impossible to alter".
That would only be true for a blockchain that is actually decentralized _and_
heavily mined. That implies a blockchain with a multitude of products using
the same chain (e.g. not just an OliveOilChain), but then we approach the
scaling border very fast, making a blockchain unusable for this use case.

~~~
noddy1
"Points 1 and two aren't solved in any way, as the buyer has to trust the
producer to not lie when making the entry. In other words, the trust problem
here occurs before entry into the database."

The blockchain will show in time that X producer sells X amount of extra
virgin, virgin, and regular olive oil. This will make it difficult for a small
single origin producer claiming that ALL of their output is extra virgin. It
would also make it difficult for a small producer to rebrand large volumes of
some other olive oil as their own.

As for the temp-sensing stickers - add GPS, encryption and transmitting
functions and you can add some cool features to temp sensing stickers.

Finally- there isn't THAT much data involved here for the $$ involved, you
could do it on the ethereum blockchain or even the litecoin chain. There are
quite a number of ultrasecure blockchains at this point.

------
pests
Everyone is claiming this could be done with a database but no one knows all
the details because the article is literally three sentences long.

The article states this initiative "helps reduce waste, better manage
contamination cases and improve transparency"

This is how I envision this system working. I think the fact this is produce
and not normal inventory is key.

Produce is produced by farmers, transported by shipping companies, stored in
warehouses, and eventually ends up on a shelf after a long chain of custody.

Reducing waste and contamination sounds like a tracking system. So every food
item gets an ID and as it moves through the system it gets logged with time,
location, and so on. Pretty standard, and yes, totally doable with a database.

But this project also helps to improve transparency. Transparency to who?

The previous actors in our example. The farmer, the shipper, storage, maybe
inspectors.

They have no inherit reason to trust each other. The last shipping company
will blame the warehouse for the moldy food. The warehouse will blame the
farmer. The inspectors said they approved of it but obviously its gone bad.

Maybe the 6 days to track this produce before wasn't really in tracking it,
but dealing with the human element of the chain of custody. Two minutes to
pull up a verified log of events.

~~~
paxys
The key here is "verified". The only way a blockchain is more trustworthy than
a regular centralized database is if the nodes are distributed across a large
number of stakeholders, and there isn't a chance of anyone gaining control of
a majority. That itself becomes impossible since they are using a single
account owner (Walmart) on a single cloud provider (IBM).

~~~
pests
IBM's platform uses Hyperledger, linked somewhere below.

It has copy on its site stating it "allows multiple different parties to
securely interact with the same universal source of truth."

I think the fact that IBM is running this, and not Walmart, is actually a
plus. The suppliers don't have to worry about Walmart itself making data
changes. Of course the details will vary, but I highly doubt the platform
allows the account owner to unilaterally make changes to this source of truth.
It's totally against the point of the project.

~~~
cm2187
Having one party to run the system wouldn’t need a block chain, just
transparency. Make the data public, available to everyone, with daily hashes
of the data of the day combined with the hash from the previous day. Sign that
hash+date to prove it has been computed by this central party alone. If the
hash cannot be recomputed then there is proof the data has been tempered with.
All other parties need to do is to download and store these daily hashes in
case of a conflict.

But all of that would be vastly simpler with a central trusted third party.

~~~
noddy1
Global supply chains involve a number of superpowers who are at proxy wars
with each other and a vast number of countries of which the majority have deep
corruption issues. Who do you designate as the trusted 3rd party?

~~~
cm2187
A company that has no skin in the game and which business it is to be a
trusted third party. One of the big audit companies would be my first thought.
But there are many businesses that play this role (exchanges, clearing houses,
etc).

At the end the job is technically quite simple. Maintaining a semi-public
database. It's pretty black or white.

~~~
noddy1
How do you account for rogue employees or hacks at the trusted 3rd party?

Equifax was a trusted 3rd party with no skin in the game.

Facebook was too (at least it was trusted by the west, the chinese never
trusted it).

~~~
cm2187
The same you prevent fraud in any industry, procedures, checks and controls.
But at least that party has no incentive to fraud.

------
jMyles
I am a regular and boistrous cheerleader for the prospects of blockchain
technologies to empower changes in the world... but I do not understand what
is going on here.

This seems entirely centralized, and thus a very poor use case for a
blockchain.

------
paxys
There's no such thing as "the" Blockchain. Walmart is using "a" Blockchain, in
which I'm guessing they themselves own and operate all nodes.

> Yiannas said blockchain was able to cut the time it took to track produce to
> two seconds from six days.

With no more detail I can't even start to think how a Blockchain DB makes any
difference?

~~~
pests
It didn't say it was using "the Blockchain." The article clearly states its
using the "International Business Machines Corp.’s blockchain platform."

~~~
paxys
> It didn't say it was using "the Blockchain."

Did you not read the title of the post, or the title of the linked article, or
the article itself?

~~~
pests
Ah yes, because all important details of a story are in the title.

~~~
tomcatfish
No, but it is the very first thing you read

~~~
pests
I would highly hope that someone would read the article, and not just the
title, before complaining about how unspecific a word in the title was.

------
ff_
I guess they didn't try with a "signed append-only log", they might be able to
shave off even these two remaining seconds.

------
osrec
Either I have greatly misunderstood the purpose of a blockchain, or they
have... I'd love to see them add some details around how the blockchain
actually saved them time and why a standard database of some kind wouldn't
suffice.

------
foota
I can see where this might be good for some sort of accreditation, although
there are other ways of achieving this. But this allows walmart to say "our
product comes from XYZ" and independent parties can verify that.

------
IncRnd
This blockchain uses IBM's blockchain technology, which is in turn created
with Hyperledger. In both cases, the technology is called enterprise grade.
That seems to be true - though, I'm not sure a blockchain is needed here.
Maybe a ledger with distributed access, but not necessarily a blockchain.

[https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/platform/](https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/platform/)

[https://www.hyperledger.org/about](https://www.hyperledger.org/about)

~~~
pests
Isn't then a blockchain an implementation of your ledger with distributed
access?

~~~
bildung
Sure, but the most inefficient one. Why buy into all the _major_ drawbacks of
a blockchain (essentially lack of speed and abundance of costs) if you can't
use any of the advantages (decentralization)?

~~~
pests
Why do you assume inefficient?

Private blockchains don't have to have nodes mining 24/7.

They can wait until the mempool is at a certain transaction count then new
blocks could be added. Or they could mine 1 transaction blocks as they come
in. It doesn't have to work like bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general.

Or maybe its batch-like and mining happens once a day at midnight.

There is no reward for adding a block so there is no race. All miners are
known and block minting can be pre-planned.

~~~
bildung
If you don't mine heavily, the blockchain essentially isn't immutable. The
race for blocks is the _only_ reason one can assume immutability. That is the
core of the problem: If you don't have a chain that's heavily mined, you don't
have the security a blockchain promises. Whats left is an unsecure database
that feels like running on a C64.

~~~
pests
That is true for Bitcoin and other public blockchains. It is not always true
for private chains.

Lets assume 10 suppliers each add 10 new 'produce transactions' on some day.
It also occurs during work hours, so maybe between 9-5 there is 100 new
transactions.

The miners are all known nodes, in fact, only 10 of them if we assume each
supplier gets one.

Once the 100 transactions are minted into new blocks and the day ends...

What exactly are the miners supposed to mine into blocks? There are no
transactions. Nothing to add.

~~~
bildung
Scenario B: Walmart rents a $5 digital ocean VPS and installs postgres. Each
producer generates a (e.g. GPG) key pair and sends the public key to Walmart.
Each day, each producer creates a new entry in the db, signs it with his/her
private key, and is done.

The mining is completely worthless in the scenario you described. Imagine
either a rogue producer or Walmart having an interest in changing the
database. In your scenario of 10 mining boxes the adversary would just have to
buy 5 additional boxes and would have complete control over the blockchain.

------
TruffleLabs
The Hyperledger Fabric, which IBM is using, is explained here:
[https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/fabric](https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/fabric)

There is a video that offers a high level view of farm to fork (agriculture
products to consumers) using the block chain ideas in Hyperledger Fabric.

From Nigel Gopie, an IBM Food Trust speaker, says "The permissioned
blockchains we rely upon (hyperledger fabric) don’t use don't use proof-of-
work or "mining" — unlike some other Blockchains like bitcoin — which is what
consumes huge amounts of energy. " (from a tweet conversation after a
presentation he gave in Denver April 2018:
[https://twitter.com/analyticsbytes/status/984140954834632704](https://twitter.com/analyticsbytes/status/984140954834632704))

------
quickthrower2
Replace "Blockchain" with "Database" and it would all be true.

Walmart Inc. is getting suppliers to put food on the [database] to help reduce
waste, better manage contamination cases and improve transparency.

Yiannas said [database] was able to cut the time it took to track produce to
two seconds from six days.

~~~
JetSpiegel
Someone should fork that cloud-to-butt extension.

------
swalsh
Blockchain is the new NoSQL. In 10 years some poor engineer tasked with
maintaining this thing is going to ask why they didn't use a more reasonable
technology.

~~~
cm2187
Resume driven development... Like running massively cpu intensive calculations
in python, or storing 100 MB csv files in Hadoop. AI will be the same thing.
We will see developers burning GPUs for days to solve problems that would be
trivially and efficiently solved with a simple algorithm. And I have no
problem with people toying with new technologies on home projects just to
learn. But at work...

------
Quenty
Is a blockchain even required for this? Does it provide any technical
advantage here in this case?

------
denzil_correa
> Walmart Inc. is getting suppliers to put food on the blockchain

Phew! Blockchain is NOT a database, you don't put something _ON_ blockchain.
Blockchain is meant to track changes of data, not store the data. The size of
the entire Bitcoin Blockchain over the last 9+ years is 194.86GB [0] i.e. it
can be stored on your local hard drive. Therefore, you can't put "food on
blockchain".

[0] [https://bitinfocharts.com](https://bitinfocharts.com)

------
pure-awesome
This just in!

Amazon to stop delivering goods by walking to people's front doors, now
delivering through the radio waves!

------
cornholio
I eagerly expect the converse product: Blockchain enabled sanitation systems,
that would allow one to relieve themselves on the Blockchain.

That's a billion dollar ICO right there.

------
snissn
Is the article partially behind a pay wall?

