I'd love it if the discussion could get more concrete. For example, what's a specific case of international trade fraud that a blockchain could have prevented, and why is a blockchain needed to prevent it?
https://corda.net/global-trade/
Trade Finance 101 - two companies in very different parts of the world want to trade for some non-trivial sum of money, e.g. buying a shipment of goods. You'd think this would be simple but it's really not. The two parties often do not actually trust one another, in particular they may have very little visibility into mundane things like the insolvency risk of their counterparties. This is an actual problem because in the physical world you can't atomically swap things for money, so someone is going to have to either pay first or deliver first. If you pay and then the seller doesn't deliver, that may cause you to go under. If the seller ships and you never pay, ditto in reverse. So the importer may go to their bank and request a "letter of credit", which is basically a form of escrow in which the importer's bank will guarantee to pay on presentation of proof of delivery e.g. bills of lading. They may also help arrange things like a maritime insurance policy, they have expertise in how to handle shipping disputes and so on. Often the importer's bank will send these documents direct to the exporters bank because the exporter may need a short term loan to cover the cost of actually making the goods. But the exporter is just receiving literally a bundle of physical documents in many cases, and the loans in question can be large, so they are vulnerable to document forging. Forged trade finance documents are actually a major source of AML problems and fraud.
Then you have to actually ship it. That's more documents and payments to the shipping companies, to get your goods cleared at customs, dealing with freight forwarders etc. And so on and so forth. Long story short: documents everywhere, most of which aren't even in any sort of real data format (e.g. PDFs are common) and some of which aren't even in computers at all, depending on where you're dealing with!
In the world of enterprise logistics there are very few properly digitized systems, because it's very hard to get everyone in the world to agree to just use some arbitrary SaaS app. You can try, and companies like Flexport are doing it, but the players in all of these transactions are (a) very conservative, and (b) very reluctant to lock in something as fundamental as their ability to import/export to the fate of some random American VC backed startup. And for good reason! Imagine if they'd all jumped on board such a company but instead of a US firm providing the centralized SaaS it was, for example, Russia. Now imagine the global trading SaaS has an outage, or gets hacked. Or simply raises prices.
So what to do? The actual answer settled on by the world's trading and logistics people is ... do nothing. Stick with the faxes and couriers. Or at best you get an ad-hoc patchwork of individual systems between specific counterparties.
Enter the enigma called "enterprise blockchain" or sometimes distributed ledger technology. These platforms may or may not actually have blocks, chains, proofs of work or tokens in them. The one I designed (Corda) has none of these things albeit there's a "tokens framework" if you want to create such things on top of the core. What these platforms are actually trying to do is provide standardized mechanisms for:
1. Inter-firm identity (fairly standard X.500 PKIX in the case of Corda)
2. Inter-firm messaging that isn't SWIFT (AMQP+client/server TLS in Corda), and really you also need inter-firm state machines and protocol frameworks (the "flow framework" in Corda, which uses a JVM coroutine library).
3. Serialization of signed data structures (AMQP+extensions)
4. The really hard bit: signed, irrefutable inter-firm transactions with data integrity, with some reasonably acceptable level of privacy. Think P2P tables, stored procedures, foreign key constraints and so on but in which you're not allowed to actually show the full transaction to anyone at any point including the tx ordering subsystem.
The latter part is where the blockchain-y aspects enter the picture although in reality they don't normally use proof of work or stake. In Corda it's pluggable and some projects just use Raft. Others can simply use an RDBMS to provide 'double spend' protection. And there's also a BFT plugin I think, although I'm not sure if it ever launched (they're doing a big rewrite of the platform at the moment). It's pluggable because what we found is that participants often had rather complicated trust models in which they were very concerned with things like data integrity losses due to mistakes/botched upgrades, passive adversaries (competitors, foreign governments), not so concerned with active adversaries and very concerned with availability/DoS attacks of various kinds including political DoS. This makes sense given their environment, in which everyone is identifiable and basically follows the law but competitors may be tempted to 'peek' at data they weren't meant to see, and governments may be tempted to just ignore laws for geopolitical advantage sometimes.
In an ideal world all this would be standardized and there'd be an ecosystem of vendors selling different implementations. In practice even just figuring out a design that all the different players can accept was a very hard challenge, making it work was harder still (decentralized asynchronous upgrades in particular were practically a research level problem), and Corda went the "open core" direction so other firms could just build off the open source code and data structures instead of having to re-implement it all from RFCs and other loose spec documents. That seemed to satisfy people.
So anyway that's the background to these sorts of projects. They do make sense but are very hard to make work due to the massive variety of players, hard technical challenges and complex commercial/geo-political concerns.
I have some nitpick of course :)
> just build off the open source code and data structures instead of having to re-implement it all from RFCs and other loose spec documents.
It's never "just". What you're providing are exactly lose specs. E.g. "Serialization of signed data structures (AMQP+extensions)". What are the data structures? What do they look like? Which extensions? What happens if someone doesn't support all the extensions?
RFCs and standards however bad they are exist for a reason. And even then people implement them poorly, or not at all.
> hard to make work due to the massive variety of players, hard technical challenges and complex commercial/geo-political concerns.
Unfortunately, in this list technical challenges should go last. For all the reasons you described in the first half of your message :)
One of the possible reasons for TradeLens demise is that they choose to ignore them and came up with their own data structures (Json) i.e. partners that are usually EDIFACT capable had to practically start from scratch to comply with TradeLens format.
At some point TradeLens realized that and started partially accepting EDI feeds, but it was too little, too late I guess.
breach of trust is indeed a major problem and it erodes the social contract and technology could obviously play a positive role. not by creating inflated hypes that are only good for management consulting fees though...
I think this take is either a bit disingenuous or possibly just misinformed. There are very few people who don't want 'government money' because it comes from government and government bad.
People want money that isn't associated with government because they believe, among other reasons, that having access to the levers and dials that fiat currency provides corrupts the government (as a system), the government (as in the people who govern), and the markets that they govern over. Time and time again governments have shown that they lack the ability to responsibly operate those levers and dials so a growing number of people are suggesting that maybe that shouldn't be something we put into a small cadre of human hands.
This is a little bit like if we had a government-regulated medical system and the government decided to make heart medicine very expensive because the rate of population growth was too high and we needed to slow down the biological market, only to panic 5 years later and make birth control cost 500 times as much and all other medicines free when the population growth got too low and then repeat that cycle forever, all the while turning a blind eye to a parasite class that profited from these cycles.
There is no intrinsic reason why the financial system could not be organized and, where required, regulated with the same (in)competency or transparency or checks-and-balances as any other domain of equal importance. To accept this can't be done is to imply that the particular parasite class benefiting from the status-quo is more of a parasite than others. This doesn't feel to be the case. In the scheme of things there are worse leeches, some in plain sight.
The naivete and total inadequacy of cryptocurrency as an alternative financial system is exploding right as we speak. While it had (maybe) some limited use signalling to the status-quo that "they should behave - or else" - see e.g. CBDC, the exploitation and betrayal of countless individuals with fake promises will ultimately only further entrench the notion that there is no alternative to the parasites. That is sad.
It all loops back to building trust networks and enticing individuals to participate because they will be better of and not screwed by insiders. This cannot be enforced magically by numerical algorithms and blockchains. It is a contract by and for humans.
You further suggest that cryptocurrency is somehow 'exploding' - crypto dollar prices routinely 'explode' up or down because it's very, very small and it's new enough that gullible people are quick to dump buckets of money into the ocean of scams that exist and they inevitably evaporate, taking that money with them.
That's not a feature of 'crypto' and it doesnt mean that crypto is dead - I wish I had a little bit of ETH for every time crypto was 'dead' - cryptocurrency is fundamentally just the idea of a a decentralized bookkeeping algorithm, with different details on how you keep that book. A lot of people suggest to gullible investors that the best way to keep that book is to trust a small group of people to keep the book for you, which is of course a recipe for disaster and is no better than just having a MS excel spreadsheet on my computer. The results are predictably 'explodey'.
The serious crypto projects, meanwhile, just continue development. There are enormous communities of people who sincerely believe in the promise of a future with permissionless programmable money. These people were working a decade ago, a year ago, a week ago, they'll be working tomorrow.
Another post suggests that everyone interested in crypto is interested to make money. I can't help that they've only been exposed to people looking to make a quick buck but I think it's safe to say in most human activities many of the people involved will be trying to find a personal benefit in as short a timescale as possible. In the same way, in most human activities there will be a core group of people trying to change the world around them for the better. Crypto is no different.
My main point (restated in the ethics context) is that there is no reason why ethical standards should be lower in finance. In a sane society that is not ripping itself apart in theft and exploitation all critical systems (and finance certainly qualifies) must benefit from a similar level of good governance. We de-facto trust each other on countless important matters and our focus and efforts should be on the cases where this trust is betrayed. A technology that is built on the premise of a trust-less society is at best a monumental waste of human talent and at worst deceitful and malevolent.
Every single crypto enthusiast I know, builder or speculator, has converted crypto to fiat riches, and dreams of wealth. I have yet to meet someone who lives frugally and keeps their wealth in volatile crypto coins.
So centralization would have always worked. At Maersk, or some industry trade group or something.
They never needed a blockchain. It was just the cool word of the day to make them hip.