IBM has cut its blockchain team down to almost nothing

Re:IBM has cut its blockchain team down to almost nothing – ... by baby on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @02:28PM (#26017997)

The supply chain stuff always sounds to me like a scam, and every time I had someone pitch me a blockchain supply chain startup it was indeed a scam (and I told them so). Now maybe there’s an element I’m missing, but there’s still a fundamental problem in linking a real world object to something on the chain. Digital currency works because it is only on the chain, and we manage to agree that it has value, or we use trusted third parties to move that value to the real world in something we can tell is real USD (although the banking system is so opaque that...)

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Re:IBM has cut its blockchain team down to almost nothing – ... by x86ARMsRace on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @07:00PM (#26020906)

You're not missing anything. I've developed a prototype blockchain for a supply chain before at the behest of a non-technical manager at some point. You hit the nail on the head with the problem of crossing into the real world. You can't validate the real world object mathematically, so if you lie to the blockchain, there's no way to tell.

So far the only use case that I can really find for this are digital identity systems where the blockchain itself serves a double purpose as both a highly redundant system, and a byzantine fault tolerant distributed storage system. I can see the value in being able to maintain a strong ledger of ID uses. The EU looked into this from what I understand, and I think they stood up a system for this kind of thing.

My big TLDR from working on chaincode and stuff like that is this: if your goal is to have a high security digital asset (eg: tokens and ID certs), then a blockchain might be useful. If your goal is to interface with the real world, then you're just going to be chaining yourself to a bulky inelegant solution that won't even address your core problem.

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Re:IBM has cut its blockchain team down to almost nothing – ... by baby on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @11:37PM (#26022656)

The first time I felt like there was real potential for a blockchain, outside of digital currencies, was with DNS + PKI systems. Pretty much identity for websites. I thought it was a much sexier alternative to the current way DNS works and how certificate authorities work. Now does it scale as well? Does it work well for light clients? And is it the right system when you know people will make mistakes and lose keys?

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