IBM might be able to do this as long as they're not also trading in the same markets that are running on their supply chain database. Fwiw JP Morgan tried to create a global supply chain database back in the 80s but it never took off. Few parties were willing to give JP Morgan such a clear view of their operations and the overall market, knowing that whatever it saved them in efficiency and better trade financing, JP Morgan would find ways of extracting value in the markets, likely at the participants' expense.

> Fwiw JP Morgan tried to create a global supply chain database back in the 80s but it never took off.

Interesting. Do you have some pointers for more information on these efforts?

IBM, JP Morgan, et al. are developing private blockchains with the aim of cheap, semi-distributed consensus and uniformity. That is what it provides over an SQL database.

Take for instance the options contract market. Let's say you have a pool of 50 trusted brokerages and financial institutions that rapidly trade these contracts. The current solution is each entity has their own custom, internal tracking system along with either a centralized service that they all communicate with, or inter-party connections. In either case, this is fragile, highly expensive to build and maintain and is often slow.

The blockchain isn't a miracle technology like these articles portray it as, and IBM, JP Morgan, et al don't see it that way anyway. It is a convenience tool for a more robust ledger that will lower costs for trusted inter-party transactions.

Private blockchains make no sense whatsoever. The only advantage of blockchains over traditional consensus algorithms is Sybil tolerance. Private blockchains, lose out on that advantage will still taking on all the disadvantages of the blockchain.

The top public blockchain that could be used to track pork chops - Ethereum - has been proven to be fundamentally insecure.

If there is a benefit in using blockchain to track pork chops, and if all the pork chop companies know and kinda-trust each other already, a private blockchain could keep the hackers out and implement various security schemes, and maybe even have a board that could publicly organize a rollback to undo a "DAO-hack". (As seen with Ethereum, such a "board" exists implicitly anyway even in a public blockchain system).

The ability to rollback "bad" transactions would be key in being able to comply with legal requirements, resolve contract disputes, etc. Plus having Sybil proof systems require PoW or PoS both of which could be difficult and inefficient for a market specific solution. E.g. why would people want to run a miner for pork chop trading? PoS might work though but still requires a founding core group that's trusted IMHO.

When was Ethereum proven to be insecure? It was proven that not all third party applications built on top of Ethereum are secure. That doesn't prove that they can't be secure. Arguing that Ethereum is insecure because a contract written on top of it had a bug is like arguing that the US dollar is insecure because a bank storing it was robbed.

I meant the third party applications (which a pork chop tracking system would be). The pure blockchain crypto should be safe.

But do you enjoy reading something like this [1]? Can you analyze blockchain code like that? Ideally before you know that there's a bug?

It's on Ethereum to show how to make things secure. The general level of software buggyness is inacceptable if you say "code is law".

[1] http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/18/analysis-of-the-dao...

Well, that's the only advantage of proof-of-work secured blockchains. There are strategies that use something blockchain-like for simple distributed consensus, which do have advantages[1] (and also disadvantages) over other approaches to distributed consensus.

1- The main advantage over something like Paxos or Raft is simplicity. There are also serious disadvantages, and normally I would still suggest grabbing a library that does Paxos or Raft instead of something blockchain-based. Still, it's not "no advantage".

Still, even with that difference, they have the big advantage(for managers) of having their security tested(to some extent, it is a different implementation) at such a large scale at bitcoin.

The implementation is what needs to be tested. Consensus algorithms are generally proven rigorously (given certain empirically verifiable assumptions).

Proven? that's great.

You're right, from a technology point of view. But for this system to run, you need to convince a lot of people, from different cultures/backgrounds, to use it.

Maybe talking about the safety of the bitcoin network instead of a mathematical proof makes that marketing challenge easier ?

Something that confuses me about this blockchain hype. I was under the impression that it's the distributed nature of crypyo-currencies that makes them secure as opposed to the blockchain alone? It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to re-calculate >1M sha256's to rewrite the chain if it's all a system owned/controlled by one company. Am i missing the point?

Yeah,you also need enough people willing to mine (and spend a lot of money doing so) your pork chops blockchain, otherwise anyone could come along and do a 50% attack.

Yeah. Isn't this a major problem with all of these alternative implementations? The 50% problem will always be an issues in small deployments.

It's still a problem in the largest deployment. Does anyone have a "solution" to this?

In this specific case, it seems like what they really should do is have a set of trusted nodes for ledger replication.

Surely the best antidote to the 51% attack is to have a large population of nodes so that an attack would have to be prohibitively large?

W.r.t. having a set of trusted nodes, that's fine, however does the blockchain add anything in this situation?

No. That's actually my point. This industry probably doesn't want to invest in always having 51% of the nodes, so trusted central ledgers makes more sense to me.

The solution is to not use PoW.

Private chains don't depend on PoW.

Isn't PoW the defining characteristic of a blockchain?

Just to give a bit more detail with a blockchain you need some way to limit who can create a new block since you can change history by building a chain on an earlier block if you can create as many blocks as you want. In public networks this is hard since people can create as MD Danny accounts as they want so PoW which limits who can submit by resource usage or something similar is needed. In a private network you know all the participants so you can achieve the same result with something as simple as round robin.

To me that feels like just a general consensus database problem, which has been solved a long time before bitcoin came along and "blockchain" gained mindshare. It appears "private blockchain" is mostly trying to ride the buzzword hype if it doesn't incorporate the new ideas and solutions that Satoshi presented, which is mostly about generating consensus for a ledger among a set of anonymous and possibly hostile peer-to-peer nodes on a public network?

Right so it's just a different way to solve the problem.

Satoshi didn't coin the term blockchain and they existed for a long time before bitcoin so giving him sole claim to it because it paired it with a feature that isn't specifically required to have a blockchain seems silly.

That said I do agree that their are a lot of buzzword vultures using it at the moment for stupid business ideas though I think 99% of the bitcoin business ideas are poorly thought out and poor replacements for existing solutions("but with bitcoin!") so it's no surprise 99% of the blockchain ones are too.

No, it is just a good(the best?) way to do public blockchains.

You can do Proof of Authority instead of Proof of Work to cut down costs.

The real reason behind techniques such as PoW instead of just Distributed Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithms is scaling in terms of number of validators. Most of DBFTs (afaik Algorand is the only exception) don't really scale. Proof of Authority behaves similarly to PoW, since it also does not have that problem.

Go with DBFT unless you want to have huge number of validators.

That's a valid point. I suppose the whole blockchain idea has several modular interchangeable parts though, including deciding what chain is authoritative, who can mine a block, and so on.

In the original form though, it makes no sense to fire up your own bitcoin, because when it's small it's vulnerable to the attack you mention.

There are different ways to limit who can write to a chain at the current time to reduce overhead. PoW is just the most popular(are arguably the best for public chains). Private chains don't need that since you know all the participants you can do something as simple as round robin.

Companies don't want to use an 'IBM blockchain'; they want their blockchains, with the data inside and the chaincode specific to their business logic, fully on-prem. And chances are higher than not that these blockchains will operate inside an adversarial environment. With a BFT-enabled blockchain (Hyperledger can be this), there isn't a need for trust at any business layer. That best represents the current state of many global supply chains today - there isn't a lot of trust in this business.

Block chains are at best only secured as much as the hash power to generate them. If your spending 1M / year generateing a block chain it takes about that much hash power to break it.

This creates a vast overhead as you can't secure a billion+ dollar market without massive and continuous investments.

You're wrong. Most enterprise blockchains use BFT algorithms or even round-robin instead of mining. What they are after is a highly auditable shared computing environment.

You can use things that are not a distributed block chains.

But if you have some trusted party just use a DB.

The use of PoW isn't what makes a block chain a block chain. The idea is that you don't have a single trusted party you have a collection of them that need to collude to cause harm to spread the required trust.

Surely the trust issues in global supply chains - involving making and shipping physical products often subject to regulatory oversight in multiple jurisdictions - are much bigger than "the database isn't mutable"? Ultimately, a blockchain database can lie just as much about the quantity and quality of what's being shipped as a transponder which all interested parties can track on their own non-blockchain auditing systems.

One of the attractive features, as I understand it (which is quite superficial) is that there is traceability --so that if I were a recipient of some kind of subsidy/assistance those monies received could be tagged for certain things like say rent, food, medicine, but not vice, or entertainment. Of course, that does not prevent someone from receiving such 'traced' good and bartering them, but it adds a disincentive.

I agree that the blockchain is a whole lot of overkill for these applications. I think people have to realize that blockchains are only justified if parties don't trust each other or their communications channels. It's a solution for Byzantine consistency. If you don't have Byzantine consistency problems, just use Paxos or Raft.

Neither of those systems would scale. Have you ever heard of a paxos/raft scaled beyond ~9 odd members in production?

Blockchain's also provide data redundancy and security between entities. It'd be way more effective way to communicate commodities, medical records, etc as the security, data model, and system API are all integrated into the blockchain model.

Having the "database" be the API would be great for those of us dealing with supply chain. Want information from your supplier in Shenzhen? Good luck with current systems! Paxos/raft do nothing to resolve data access and verification.

Do you think this is a function of marketing, or genuine ignorance as to what can be accomplished? (Or both?)

It's a function of people not digging into the technical details.

If you don't do that it's easy for your idea of what something is to morph into something sexy that's the best thing since sliced bread. Also it's a function of non technical people having a brainstorming session. They pat each other on the back for taking this thing to the next level, which is actually the previous level.

I see... your description reminds me of how I thought about physics when I was 9. I was big on the "wonder" of it, light on the math and the science. I can see how enthusiasm and ignorance would be a potent combination, without any dishonesty entering into the equation.

I think you are right. The older I get and the more people I work with I realize that most people are just ignorant. They come up with a "good idea" based on their ignorance and then push it. I know what it is like, because I have done it in the past, and still have to check myself even today. The best way I have found to combat this sort of situation is have a core group of trusted friends with various backgrounds. They will be the first to let me know my "good idea" is actually a bad idea and usually point me in the right direction to educate myself.

The problem is in the corporate world there is no trust. People seem to get the notion that if you use facts to show them their idea is bad that it is some sort of personal attack. Or worse, there are those in the corporate world that can spot a bad idea and not say anything -- only to watch it fail.

This is even more problematic in remote jobs (work from home). Most communication is non-verbal and much easier to misunderstand the writers true meaning/intentions.

Even without that, its a confounding problem for me. Im always doing those things: asking questions either to genuinely learn or to ferret out possible mistakes, pointing out errors, sharing better methods/techniques, etc. I just cant help it, and while I try hard to word things in a constructive manner, to make sure it IS constructive, more often than not I think it is taken poorly.

I want the same criticism of my own work, but I still often have a difficult time with it myself, though I recognize the signs as the knee-jerk reactions that they usually are, and seem to get better at that every day.