[HN Gopher] Maersk/IBM to discontinue TradeLens, a blockchain-en...
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Maersk/IBM to discontinue TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled global
trade platform
Author : kgwgk
Score : 242 points
Date : 2022-11-30 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.maersk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.maersk.com)
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I am not happy for the economic downturn, as lots of people will
| lose jobs, more people will die of hunger, people will lose their
| houses.
|
| On the other hand there is a silver lining in all the bad... all
| the useless over hyped techs will finally be seen for what they
| are
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> lots of people will lose jobs_
|
| Isn't employment at highest rate ever? At least that's what I
| keep hearing.
| nosianu wrote:
| Here in Germany we get yet another "we need much more
| immigration because of labor shortage" article in the major
| news media at least every week, I saw even more than that the
| last two weeks with at least three in Zeit and Spiegel the
| last week, on the top of the homepage each time.
|
| Just today (paywall, German): https://www.zeit.de/politik/202
| 2-12/fachkraefteeinwanderung-... -- or https://www.manager-
| magazin.de/unternehmen/iw-studie-fachkra...
|
| Of course, also every time they completely ignore 80% of what
| the comments say, from individual experiences of qualified
| people looking for a job to arguments about not seeing any
| increase in compensation, asking how that can be if there's a
| market. I myself remember not long ago meeting a young
| university-qualified engineer with a few years of experiences
| still having to work for a body-lease shop, moving him
| between different employers every year, so that they can
| avoid actually hiring such engineers. Or the bad working
| conditions in craft jobs, where there really is a large unmet
| demand, but it's still extremely unattractive to enter this
| market.
|
| I find the lack of any reaction to the overwhelming feedback
| they get every single time to these articles more than a bit
| suspicious. They repeat the exact same message without the
| slightest change. Maybe quoting a different person (always
| from an employer organization) and using slightly different
| sentences, not an exact reprint, but definitely the exact
| content every time.
|
| I have no doubt that some companies have trouble finding the
| right people, but I also have no doubt that there is
| something seriously wrong on a deeper level. Unfortunately
| the media are no help trying to shed some light on the deeper
| and more complex issues.
| wil421 wrote:
| I'm US based but used to work with a lot of people in EU/UK
| and Eastern Europe. Almost all of the IT/Software Engineer
| staff from German and UK customers I worked with were
| contractors. I was a little shocked about how much was
| outsourced to avoid a full time employee. Almost all were
| talented but only a very small German IP phone company and
| a very high tech German lens maker had staff software
| engineers.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> I was a little shocked about how much was outsourced
| to avoid a full time employee._
|
| Because in Germany, firing full time employees is nearly
| impossible, so companies use contractors from body-shops
| or off-shore work to Eastern Europe to avoid the risks of
| being sattled with useless employees they can't get rid
| of later.
|
| I've seen this happen first hand. Many older German SW
| engineers from traditional companies refused to keep up
| with modern tech and tools, preferring to coast and do
| nothing till retirement, rather than learn and adapt,
| bogging the company down heavily.
|
| One old German dude I used to work with would
| intentionally break git repos in protest, because he
| didn't like _" this new complicated git thing"_ and
| didn't understand why _" we can't just keep using
| Clearcase?"_, despite receiving numerous trainings paid
| by the company on how to use git. He was still kept
| around because he couldn't be fired but wasn't
| contributing to anything productive. Same with
| transitioning employees like him to "new" programming
| languages like Java or C#.
|
| Stuff like this is why EU devs earn less than US devs and
| why traditional German companies are no SW leaders and
| will die a slow death.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > he didn't like "this new complicated git thing" and
| didn't understand why "we can't just keep using
| Clearcase?"
|
| Maybe his point was valid?
| ls15 wrote:
| There is a (real) shortage of nurses, but not necessarily
| of blockchain engineers.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| The shortage of nurses in European countries is caused by
| the poor pay, long hours and high stress working
| conditions in the overburdened and underfunded public
| healthcare system, not by the lack of qualified
| personnel.
|
| After Covid, thanks to remote work as well, many nurses
| switched careers to something that pays better or has
| more reasonable hours and flexibility.
|
| We have enough qualified people that could do the nursing
| job but not enough of them are willing to do it, making
| it basically an artificial self inflicted shortage.
| Private healthcare facilities had no shortage of nurses
| as they can charge customers whatever the current market
| rate is, not what the government says it should be.
|
| Increased pay and working conditions could cause nurses
| to return to the public sector, but then the question is
| _" where money from?"_
| mjhay wrote:
| I don't think you were making this argument, but the
| private healthcare system in the US is suffering a
| nursing "shortage" as well, so it shouldn't be taken as a
| truism that in the private sector, the wages and
| conditions simply improve enough to balance the supply of
| nurses.
| danrocks wrote:
| Bitcoin solves that.
| nosianu wrote:
| Yes, as I said, shortages may be real - however, the
| media don't react at all to the numerous people raising
| the question of why there is no increase in the price to
| meet the demand, meaning higher wages.
|
| My point was not that there are no shortages, but that
| the writers of the many articles about it are deaf to any
| feedback and only promote the exact same talking points
| without change.
|
| The "pro markets" side has always been quick to point to
| "the market" - but strangely, they completely ignore it
| when it comes to employment, where the market does not
| seem to work at all. Price seems to be decoupled from
| demand and those same pro-market voices ignore any and
| all questions about that phenomenon.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I don't know where you are but nurses are getting higher
| pay -- often including double or more for overtime (which
| is great in the short term but not sustainable). I have a
| son looking at nursing now because the job prospects are
| better than tech and with the aging population I don't
| see demand for nurses relaxing anytime soon.
| [deleted]
| Reason077 wrote:
| It almost seems like we _need_ a decent recession every few
| decades to flush out all the nonsense and get the global
| economy to focus its resources and innovation back on things
| that really make a difference.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Unfortunately what usually happens to get the global economy
| going again is a major war.
| college_physics wrote:
| > the need for full global industry collaboration has not been
| achieved
|
| therein lies the problem of (non-cryptocurrency) blockchain,
| sometimes phrased as " solution seeking problem".
|
| had there been a _will_ for "collaboration" (and in many cases
| there should be) one does not need to wait for this specific type
| of algorithmic advance to make it happen: existing databases,
| cryptography, networks and maybe a few human auditors in the loop
| would already offer 80/20 solutions.
|
| there was always a chance that there is sweet spot, a particular
| bottleneck that some variation of blockchain would just be the
| right tool for. apparently that is not the case.
| MBCook wrote:
| They already trust each other anyway. They have contracts. And
| you wouldn't supply shipping containers to Maersk to ship from
| here to their destination if you didn't think you could trust
| them to do it.
|
| 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.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| In these platforms key players are often governments and
| customs/excise offices, so they don't always trust each other
| no. Trade finance is really complicated largely due to the
| lack of trust, actually. Banks that deal with it have entire
| offices devoted to detecting document fraud. The use case and
| need for better solutions is real, but TradeLens maybe wasn't
| the platform to achieve it.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| These conversations are always so vague that one has to
| wonder if it's deliberate.
|
| 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?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It's not deliberate, it's just a huge topic. I spent
| years learning about it because I worked on the
| underlying platform that's used in several competitors to
| TradeLens:
|
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| I absolutely love the insight.
|
| 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 :)
| disqard wrote:
| This is a fantastic inside look at this particular
| domain! Thank you for making time to write this up.
| college_physics wrote:
| yes, the misrepresentation of how much trust is already at
| work at so many levels in society has been such a bizarre
| thing to watch over the last few years. its a particurarly
| acute condition with the cryptobros, who don't trust
| "government money" but would happily buy government regulated
| food, be treated by government regulated doctors and medicine
| etc etc :-)
|
| 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...
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >who don't trust "government money" but would happily buy
| government regulated food, be treated by government
| regulated doctors and medicine etc
|
| 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.
| yunohn wrote:
| > People want money that isn't associated with government
| because they believe
|
| 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.
| college_physics wrote:
| hmm, the failings of current monetary, credit and
| securities/markets systems are very well known to anybody
| who is not captured. To my knowledge cryptocurrency is
| not the answer to any of these problems.
|
| 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.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| You suggest that ethical financial market regulation is
| possible. If you can point to a single time in human
| history where this has been the case, I will concede the
| point.
|
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > had there been a will for "collaboration" (and in many cases
| there should be)
|
| The problem is, collaboration is seen by many as a danger to
| their business: common standards make it easier for clients to,
| sorry for the pun, jump ship; transparency / auditability makes
| it harder to hide internal fuck-ups and as a result provide an
| incentive for customers to jump ship.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| International shipping involves multiple countries by
| definition, as well as ports, ships, containers, etc. How
| could it not also involve "collaboration" ?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Why do you think that e.g. Deutsche Bahn is active in sixty
| countries with their logistics subsidiary DB Schenker? Or
| why Deutsche Post subsidiary DHL is active virtually
| worldwide? Or why Amazon has shifted a large amount of
| parcels to their own logistics networks instead of using
| the national shipping services like USPS?
|
| Vertical integration offers way better profits than
| cooperating with intermediaries, and the ultra large
| logistics giants want to make as much profit as possible.
| freddref wrote:
| the need hasn't been achieved? As in, there is no need..
|
| I didn't expect it be said out loud like this!
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| > Unfortunately, while we successfully developed a viable
| platform
|
| Translation: "The prototype kind of worked..."
|
| > the need for full global industry collaboration has not been
| achieved. As a result, TradeLens has not reached the level of
| commercial viability necessary to continue work and meet the
| financial expectations as an independent business.
|
| "...but only then did we find out nobody cared."
| Zigurd wrote:
| There are fewer than 100 million shipping containers in use
| today. A database of all of them, their location, their
| destination, and what they contain is not even "big data." this
| is a mole hill built into a hype mountain with some crypto
| jargon.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| So let's see. Back of the envelope math time. Let's round to
| 100 million containers to make the math simpler. 8 bytes for a
| synthetic primary key. 8 bytes each also for location and
| destination, referencing a separate table with information
| about "places" (e.g. loading docks, port terminals, holds of
| ships), that should be more than enough distinct IDs to give
| you as fine-grained location identification as you need.
| Description, let's say 512 bytes of free text. 8 + 8 + 8 + 512
| = 536 bytes, let's say with padding and DB overhead of various
| kinds we round up to the next power of 2, an even 1kb. 1kb *
| 100 million is then roughly 100 Gb.
|
| Now I am aware of the risk of "why don't they just"-ing, but
| seriously, nobody else did this math and noticed that the whole
| database could probably fit on a $15 SD card? No, most likely
| someone did, and kept their mouth shut, because why blow up a
| perfectly good grift?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| While a good bashing, it's not really relevant, is it? It's
| about collaboration, not absolute size of the data.
|
| This comment sounds right: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply
| ?id=33802411&goto=threads%...
| JohnBooty wrote:
| That would let you describe the current location of each
| container, right?
|
| Presumably we also want to describe a history of locations
| and events for each container so we're talking a few
| additional orders of magnitude more storage and complexity.
|
| But still, your point 100% stands. We're not talking about
| something that traditional technologies can't handle.
|
| Although to be fair it seems like the blockchain fans are
| trumpeting the "publicly available ledger" aspect and not the
| "suitability for Big Data" angle... I'm no blockchain
| booster, but I don't think anybody is claiming that it
| outperforms a trad DB.
| adolph wrote:
| The containers are only the reference to the contents. The
| contents are only appreciable across borders as their
| provenance and affidavit of contents. Those claims are made
| between counterparties and inspected by government, all of
| which need to understand the source of the claim and the claim.
| danrocks wrote:
| I worked on a project for the biggest airline in SE Asia that was
| essentially their loyalty platform on the blockchain. The idea
| was that other airlines would also put their points on the same
| blockchain and they'd somehow become interchangeable. Except
| nobody came, and now said airline has a very expensive piece of
| tech to maintain, built on a service (Azure Blockchain) that has
| been discontinued.
|
| Link: https://www.singaporeair.com/en_UK/es/media-centre/press-
| rel...
| gus_massa wrote:
| Can they just dump all info to a standard database and close?
|
| I guess the users must use their secret key to sign the
| connection form "anonymous" blockchain address to a normal
| userid in a database.
| monkeydust wrote:
| So a lot of these blockchain projects started around the same
| time. They have not delivered and as money runs dry they cant get
| more funding as the economy tightens and heads towards what is
| probably a short recession.
|
| The other high profile blockchain failure was the ASX one
| reported earlier this month:
|
| https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/they-were-b...
|
| Expect more to follow.
| dhdgrygev wrote:
| Lol. Last time I said there was no real world use for blockchain
| tech besides crypto, people put this as a counter example. Look
| how well that went.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| I keep getting the feeling that IBM is a con operation. They
| piggyback onto the latest fad and advertise how they can solve
| things with it, but keep failing to produce meaningful things..
| and then they blame the fad for it.
| chanakya wrote:
| The blockchain continues to be a solution looking for a problem.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Shocking ! That actual money was spent by actual people who put
| it on blockchain. And to solve exactly what problem that
| traditional data systems could not solve?
| rawicki wrote:
| I always understood that TradeLens is something that could be
| built with a simple database but they used Blockchain to hype up
| potential partners to sign up.
|
| I'd expect to see at least some of these cynical solutions
| actually work in practice. So interesting they decided to shut it
| down, instead of just walking back the blockchain part.
| scld wrote:
| Mostly because it's not the blockchain part that was hurting
| the project.
| chris_wot wrote:
| The Australian stick-exchange came to the exact same conclusion
| and scrapped their own blockchain solution. It was always a
| stupid idea.
| gryf wrote:
| Someone finally realised it was bollocks after enough customers
| told them it was. I've been on a few projects over the years
| which the outcome was exactly that.
| lencastre wrote:
| I was just reading about them in the Levine article on Bloomberg.
| I want to make a joke about NFT containers but it's beating a
| dead horse.
| tanelpoder wrote:
| "Unfortunately, while we successfully developed a viable
| platform, the need for full global industry collaboration has not
| been achieved."
|
| So... they successfully built the solution, but then failed to
| build a suitable problem for it?
| [deleted]
| _jal wrote:
| Yep. The hype cycle at work; if you bamboozle enough people,
| even skeptics have to commit resources to the latest stupidity.
| Otherwise you're left without a "blockchain strategy" and the
| reason-by-checkbox types will think that's a bad thing.
| Unfortunately, as Gartner has well demonstrated, that's a
| substantial fraction of the market, so you can't ignore it.
| tanelpoder wrote:
| This is a great summary!
| rippercushions wrote:
| Yup, that's pretty much the question that has bedeviled all
| blockchain "innovation" since day one. Cryptocurrency still
| works (for some value of works) because it's self-contained,
| but as soon as you need to track anything in the real world you
| run into the oracle problem: how can you trust that what the
| blockchain says about the world is correct? (Spoiler, you
| can't.)
| europeanguy wrote:
| They built something and turns out that no one wants to use it.
| Happens all the time.
|
| Happens all the time, especially if no one sees a point in
| using it. In other words, it didn't solve anyone's serious
| valuable problem. Which is something that those people that
| have been saying "couldn't you just do the same thing with a
| database" already knew.
|
| Crypto went thru a lot of hype-memes, like NFTs, staking etc
| etc. But I still remember the older "nonono this is about
| blockchain as an underlying technology" meme.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Perhaps the same thing, but I think they built a solution in
| search of a problem.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| The problem is "producing sticky, heavyweight enterprise IBM
| products to invoice customers with".
|
| This retirement of the product might be more aligned with the
| expected time between major software replacement initiatives
| at typical customers than with the hype cycle of blockchains:
| IBM needs to sell some successor to TradeLens. Or, more
| simply, Maersk actually needs better software than TradeLens
| for themselves.
| ycombinatornews wrote:
| What happened? /s
| superice wrote:
| As somebody in container shipping: good riddance. There are a
| handful of sensible people who have been calling this out for
| years and years, and every time there are wishful thinkers
| telling them this is the future.
|
| The worst of it is that there is an actual business case for a
| blockchain-like solution, because in flows where the shipper of
| the goods arranges their own hinterland transportation ("merchant
| haulage") there is a huge communication gap. The hinterland party
| and the shipping line need to arrange a handover of the
| container, and communicate about this constantly, but they are
| not in direct contact with eachother, because the shipper
| contracts them independently. T-mining (https://www.t-mining.be/,
| I'm not associated with them) is solving this for the release
| rights bit of that issue, but really this problem should be
| approached much wider to solve for seaship ETA updates and
| customs documents as well. Crucially, you can't solve this
| through a trusted third party, firstly because there is none that
| operates world-wide, and secondly because it would grant enormous
| power to that party, and no logistical actor is willing to give
| away this power.
|
| Of course the major shipping lines (Maersk, MSC, CMA-CGM) have
| been pushing to integrate hinterland services in their business
| more and more, so the shipper won't choose to arrange this
| themselves to begin with. This means they have no interest in
| fixing the communication problem. This is okay for shippers in
| the short term, but long term this will ruin the market. The
| shipping market is heavily centralized with only a few large
| players, which will now gain significant control over the
| hinterland as well and be able to force their policies on inland
| container depots, barge and train operators, and trucking
| companies. It's a shame really.
| duxup wrote:
| Am I interpreting this right as Maersk / IBM was solving what
| is basically an integration problem where there's all these
| parties and all this data not communicating and they decided
| the common interface was blockchain?
|
| I work in logistics and have some visibility to integrations
| with carriers (not much international, but some) and I find
| this very amusing.
|
| That sounds a bit like "nobody will agree on what cookie to
| eat, so let's make brownies, but what kind?". Half a dozen of
| one, 6 of the other.
| woah wrote:
| Are you saying that the blockchain-for-shipping stuff might
| make the market more efficient with decentralization, but the
| big companies who have the power to sink or float it don't want
| this?
| latchkey wrote:
| How do you start with 'good riddance' and then end with 'it's a
| shame really'?
|
| It sounds more and more like these people tried to solve social
| / political problem(s), with technology.
|
| Regardless of blockchain or not... it wasn't going to work
| until they got past the social issues.
| oivey wrote:
| GP is saying they were bullshit and sucking the air out of
| the room for fixing real problems.
| ArchD wrote:
| He means the blockchain application in TFA is bullshit but
| the other situation he described regarding hinterland
| transportation is one that could benefit from a proper
| decentralized blockchain system but there is no such system.
| wnissen wrote:
| Exactly! IBM had a number of these that all involved
| "blockchain" but somehow also required that IBM host the
| blockchain in their cloud. I am no blockchain expert, but
| if you have IBM running the show, why not simply let them
| be the authority who runs a standard shared database with
| an API on top? Decentralization takes extra work, but it's
| worth it when it allows two parties to transact who,
| crucially, have no reason to trust each other and no
| convenient intermediary.
| miohtama wrote:
| This is correct. I watched a presentation long time ago
| (way too early) about a blockchain pilot for container and
| document transfer between Finland and Estonia.
|
| https://www.porttechnology.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/05/03...
|
| The author of the pilot told quite clearly that it is a
| killer for small and medium sized businesses, like few
| trucks and a man and a dog companies. Efficiencies could go
| up greatly. But then, when he pitched the idea to three
| letter logistic giant, he was thrown out from the board
| room because any decentralised network would kill the edge
| large logistics companies have. One of the main competitive
| edge for a large logistics company is that their internal
| IT systems work well and there is no problem with the
| information flow. They do not want to have a level playing
| field here.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| This is something lots of people often miss. The barriers
| to entry and the difficulty of using any system is
| someone's else's market edge. It's part of the reason why
| healthcare in the US is such a clusterfuck. It is the
| only industry with a degree of government mandates around
| price obfuscation. If you fix that, most hospitals would
| lose their edge in the market. Even the notorious
| automobile industry has clearer pricing.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| > Crucially, you can't solve this through a trusted third
| party, firstly because there is none that operates world-wide,
| and secondly because it would grant enormous power to that
| party, and no logistical actor is willing to give away this
| power.
|
| This is one of the weirder aspects of crypto. Why would
| entrusting 1000's of random people with GPUs be preferable to
| trusting one party (who, in a black chain scenario could be one
| of the GPU-holders anyway).
| idiotsecant wrote:
| That's not weird at all because the whole point of crypto is
| that _nobody trusts anyone_. A properly designed crypto
| system is just a game of incentivizing each player to do the
| thing you want them to do while assuming that they 're all
| out to screw each other.
| lottin wrote:
| No.. you're missing the point. The whole point of crypto is
| to create a market where a service is provided without
| relying on a _contractual agreement_ between the provider
| and the consumer. If you don 't have a problem using
| contractual agreements, then you're better off without
| using crypto.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >No.. you're missing the point.
|
| So I just rely on economic incentives then? Because I can
| do that centrally too.
| lottin wrote:
| Not only economic incentives, but contracts as well.
| Contracts are promises between individuals that are
| enforced by a third party, namely the judicial system.
| This way we don't have trust that everybody will do what
| they say they'll do, but instead we only have to trust
| that any promises made (in the form of a contract) will
| be enforced, if needed, to by the judicial system. Crypto
| goes beyond that. Crypto doesn't want to have to trust
| the judicial system even, and therefore contracts are out
| of the question. So it can only rely on incentives.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| But _what does that mean_?
|
| Why does it need to be decentralized? Why can't one party
| have the same incentive structure?
|
| Listen, I'm all for cryptography and Block-chains, but the
| whole proof-of thing has never made any sense to me.
|
| Maybe to make myself more clear, there are levels of trust,
| and you 100% "trust" that the miners on your random
| blockchain will do work for you in exchange for money.
| We've seen examples on even big blockchains like Solana
| where that trust is broken, even.
|
| So why exactly is that sort of trust better?
| aftbit wrote:
| > But what does that mean?
|
| It means that the GPU-holders are trusted only to make
| sure that all the other GPU holders are following the
| rules of the network.
|
| > Why does it need to be decentralized? Why can't one
| party have the same incentive structure?
|
| Because if there's only one party, then who is watching
| them and ensuring they follow the rules? Furthermore, if
| there's only a handful of parties, who knows that they
| are not colluding? This is a major problem for proof-of-X
| tokens as well, as both mining and staking have
| centralizing forces.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >Because if there's only one party, then who is watching
| them and ensuring they follow the rules?
|
| Who is watching the 100's and making sure they're
| following the rules (and before you say that there are
| people monitoring the 100's of miners, then there _could_
| be people monitoring the 1 in the same way). Maybe I 'll
| put it this way - decentralization is _one_ way to
| accomplish what you want, but it 's the least efficient
| way to do that possible. _Instead_ we should focus on
| ways to make existing centralized systems more
| transparent, but it 's hard to create ponzi schemes off
| that, so it gets less attention.
|
| Thais is actually a core concept of cryptography! The
| entire RSA algo. is based on the idea that it's _way_
| easier to check prime factors that it is to solve for
| them! So why did we decide to make it so that everyone
| has to solve for prime factors?
| someonewhocar3s wrote:
| Karunamon wrote:
| Because those thousands of random people are deeply
| incentivized to keep the network running, while being
| mathematically prohibited from doing anything untoward with
| data you send their way. The "trust" in this case is more
| about whether you believe the blockchain will be running and
| usable. The incentives and distributed nature of the system
| make for a very strong guarantee with more nines than any 1
| provider in the world can reasonably promise or deliver.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| I agree the block-chain structure and cryptography are
| cool, but why do 1000 people need to be deeply incentivized
| instead of 1?
| Karunamon wrote:
| The same reason half the internet falls over when AWS us-
| east1 does: single points of failure suck. And this is a
| level of resiliency you automatically get by virtue of
| being on a public blockchain being used for other things.
| yunohn wrote:
| > secondly because it would grant enormous power to that party,
| and no logistical actor is willing to give away this power.
|
| This is a crucial point. When you speak to crypto enthusiasts,
| they speak about oracles. However, all the oracles they build
| are for crypto coin prices... not IRL applications.
| nathias wrote:
| the problem is not the blockchain it's IBM
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| The problem is the same as it's been the whole time: the people
| who buy tech, and who have the authority to start tech
| initiatives, don't understand the technology and don't care to.
| So they chase fads and shiny objects.
| acdha wrote:
| It's more fundamental than that: this is what happens when
| you do something based on fear of being left out. Consulting
| companies like Gartner were heavily pushing blockchains half
| a decade ago, and even if they can't convey a concrete
| benefit for something there will be some fraction of
| listeners who think that they need to buy some and hope it's
| useful because they're afraid of being asked why they didn't
| in a few years. It's the high production values version of
| the salespeople who've shown up here for years saying crypto
| is the future and you're old and obsolete if you don't buy
| whatever they're selling.
|
| This same dynamic shows up in other areas - e.g. big data,
| AI, security - but blockchains are an outlier in terms of how
| little value the technology provides. A lot of big data / AI
| projects didn't deliver the huge win promised but turned out
| to be a good umbrella for getting funding to clean up a ton
| of data and processing, for example.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I'm sure they were handsomely paid by the US and several EU
| governments to develop something so "innovative" with blockchain.
| Unfortunately, nobody wanted it before the governments pulled
| funding.
| tokai wrote:
| Why would there have been governmental funding? Its a private
| project by private companies. I can't find anything on outside
| funding for tradelens. Do you have any source on that?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I don't have a source, but IBM likes making sure their R&D
| has outside funding.
| tokai wrote:
| In this case their outside funding was Maersk.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| How can that be? By putting paper work in the blockchain they
| managed to cut shipping times by 40%!
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/ibm-maersk-tradelens...
|
| Seriously though I believe the blockchain has always been hidden
| behind an API hosted by IBM (access to those who got approved and
| paid a fee), blockchain was an implementation/marketing detail
| and the whole thing could have been done with Sybase/MDB etc. If
| they had promoted this as a standard/open way of describing
| shipping data it might have been beneficial.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| ...and if IBM says it is 40%, it is definitely true. Just as
| IBM Watson is going to be the future of healthcare.
| Unfortunately, that future seems to consist of scrapping IBM
| Watson and selling it for parts /sarcasm
| dghughes wrote:
| IBM's Phoenix pay system in Canada was a disaster.
| knifie_spoonie wrote:
| What is it with IBM and payroll systems. They botched
| another one here in Australia:
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/ibm-sued-over-queensland-health-
| pa...
| danuker wrote:
| > /sarcasm
|
| You mean, they won't even bother selling it for parts? Or why
| is this sarcasm?
| conorcleary wrote:
| Selling the sarcasm.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I have plenty, and cynisism, in case someone is
| interested!
| barking_biscuit wrote:
| I would take you up on the offer, but I doubt it's
| geniune :P
| oxfordmale wrote:
| It is sold for parts
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/sivgoj/n_
| i...
|
| I add the sarcasm tag to make clear I am joking. If the
| future of healthcare is selling old computers for scrap, we
| face a bleak future.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Please stop using a /sarcasm tag. It's extremely cringe and
| ruins the comment. If you're concerned about people
| misunderstanding you get better at writing
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Please stop using the phrase "extremely cringe", and you
| will immediately be better at writing.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Probably true, but it's not wrong and at least i can take
| solace in the fact I don't use the sarcasm tag like a
| dork
| pessimizer wrote:
| > the fact I don't use the sarcasm tag like a dork
|
| Adding insult to insult I see.
|
| edit: please don't feel like you have to escalate your
| insults towards oxfordmale because I made this comment.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I think this is a horrible idea. Text is a terrible format
| to convey sarcasm, and it has nothing to do with how good
| one is at writing. If you must use sarcasm on text based
| forums like this, it's _much_ better to use an explicit
| sarcasm marker just to avoid the inevitable 300 response
| long sub-thread of people arguing about something that was
| never even intended to be taken seriously in the first
| place.
|
| That said, it's probably better to just not use sarcasm at
| all in settings like this.
| pjc50 wrote:
| HN is _terrible_ at interpreting sarcasm or jokes, partly
| because people will say the most extraordinary things with
| apparent sincerity.
| chris_wot wrote:
| On HN, it's probably best to avoid sarcasm. I've used it
| and it didn't work out well.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Sarcasm on HN is exceptionally difficult. The closest
| I've been able to get us deliberately playing around with
| Poe's Law. The issue with doing so, however, is not being
| entirely sure if you're getting up votes because people
| are in on it or think you're serious. And if you let the
| cat out of the bag and confess to it, it ruins the joke!
|
| Both the reader and the writer are left in this nebulous
| liminal space of perpetual standoff with no one able to
| make a move. I quite like it, but it's an acquired taste
| for sure.
| dvaun wrote:
| As do people in most internet forums.
|
| Poe's law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
| bee_rider wrote:
| The whole point of sarcasm is that there's a chance
| somebody won't get it. It is the author trusting the
| reader in the hopes of making a little connection when
| the reader gets it. If there's no chance of failure, the
| reader doesn't actually have to get it, so there's point
| to the whole exercise. It just becomes a joke in a
| stilted format. If you ever feel the need to include a
| /s, just make a normal joke it will be funnier.
|
| Read /s as "NOT" in Borat-voice.
| smw wrote:
| What a strange contention. I don't think I've ever used
| sarcasm without meaning my audience to understand me.
| Most movie tropes around it don't seem to be deliberately
| deceptive either.
|
| I wonder if this is a generational thing?
| bee_rider wrote:
| It isn't so much that the other party is expected not to
| get it, just that there must be some possibility. It is
| like a trust fall. You don't expect to land on your butt,
| but you have to engage in the possibility.
| pfoof wrote:
| > people will say the most extraordinary things with
| apparent sincerity.
|
| But the level of extraordinary is still far from what
| 4chan can produce
| ubercore wrote:
| Sarcasm is also really hard to deal with in text, even
| for native speakers. And super hard for non-native
| English speakers.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| I paraphrased a sentence from Scrooge (Charles Dickens) in
| an HN post discussing the plans to allow law enforcement
| robots to use lethal force. I called it an "effective way
| to reduce the surplus population". It was meant
| sarcastically, however, I got downvoted, likely because it
| was taken too seriously. It is safer to add a /sarcasm tag.
| Legogris wrote:
| The reason that comment on Christmas was downvoted was
| likely not because the sarcasm was not obvious (it was).
| It simply doesn't add anything of value to the
| conversation. Independent sarcastic remarks tend to get
| downvoted.
| eddsh1994 wrote:
| Haha! Good sarcasm :)
| rippercushions wrote:
| This thread currently contains both people confused by the
| OP's sarcasm, which didn't have a tag, and people annoyed
| by the sarcasm tag in a reply.
| pfoof wrote:
| I kind of feel you, but I got downvoted too often on Reddit
| because people cannot get sarcasm through text so this
| might be necessary
| dmitriid wrote:
| > By putting paper work in the blockchain they managed to cut
| shipping times by 40%!
|
| You make the mistake of assuming that blockchain had something
| to do with it. And not the act of replacing paper records with
| digital records. Blockchain is entirely irrelevant.
| [deleted]
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > You make the mistake of assuming that blockchain had
| something to do with it.
|
| I was trying to be sarcastic!
| chris_wot wrote:
| It doesn't work well on HN
| [deleted]
| dmitriid wrote:
| Ah, I misread you. Apologies!
| tomalpha wrote:
| > Blockchain is entirely irrelevant
|
| I believe that's exactly what the OP said above
|
| > You make the mistake
|
| I think it might be the other way round here - do go and
| reread the post you're replying to :)
| danrocks wrote:
| > Seriously though I believe the blockchain has always been
| hidden behind an API hosted by IBM
|
| I kind of misread what you said and read "Bitcoin" instead of
| "blockchain", but this wrong scenario is as funny as your
| comment. Imagine if the whole Bitcoin is powered by IBM in
| secret as a ploy to sell their blockchain consulting services
| [0].
|
| [0] - https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/services
| conorcleary wrote:
| An astonishing amount of 'hackers' on this wee forum confuse
| the two.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I would guess that placing any sort of data like this on a
| publicly-visible distributed ledger is the very last thing an
| industry like international shipping wants. Pirates might love
| it, though.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Even better: Industrial espionage, those records get you at
| least half way to know everyones BoM, suppliers and prices.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much
| "better" in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were
| gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to
| use. For example, to accept a bid on my NFT, I would have had
| to pay over $80-$150+ just in ethereum transaction fees. That
| puts an artificial floor on all bids, since otherwise you'd
| lose money by accepting a bid for less than the gas fees.
| Payment fees by credit card, which typically feel extortionary,
| look cheap compared to that. OpenSea could even publish a
| simple transparency log if people wanted a public record of
| transactions, offers, bids, etc to verify their accounting._
|
| > _However, if they had built a platform to buy and sell images
| that wasn't nominally based on crypto, I don't think it would
| have taken off. Not because it isn't distributed, because as
| we've seen so much of what's required to make it work is
| already not distributed. I don't think it would have taken off
| because this is a gold rush. People have made money through
| cryptocurrency speculation, those people are interested in
| spending that cryptocurrency in ways that support their
| investment while offering additional returns, and so that
| defines the setting for the market of transfer of wealth._
|
| https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208
| moffkalast wrote:
| Speaking of gas fees, are they still a thing now that they've
| made the move to proof of stake? Since confirmation takes no
| energy now and can be done at comparatively infinite speed it
| would make sense for transaction fees to practically vanish.
| lottin wrote:
| No, the whole idea of both PoW and PoS is the same, namely
| to prevent a Sybil attack by requiring participants to
| incur an economic cost. In PoW, participants are required
| to buy electricity, whereas in PoS they're required to buy
| a virtual token. Therefore I don't see any reason why
| switching from PoW to PoS should result in lower fees.
| derefr wrote:
| Making "mining" cheap, and speeding up the network, were
| originally supposed to be one project, but got split into
| two separate efforts so that PoS could be shipped sooner
| (and so stop consuming half the world's supply of GPUs +
| 0.1% of all electricity sooner.) Gas is still expensive
| because "space for transactions in a block" is still a
| scarce resource, because blocks are still only being
| produced once per 10 seconds.
|
| And they can't just flip a switch making it go N times
| faster right now, because transaction execution is a serial
| bottleneck -- a "full" Ethereum node can only evaluate
| transactions at the speed of a single pinned CPU core, and
| the average CPU's single-core performance isn't going to
| become orders-of-magnitude faster any time soon. So there
| is currently a fundamental limit on how many _transactions_
| the network can execute per second, regardless of how they
| 're packed into blocks. (And also, even if there was no
| such bottleneck, the per-node chain state would also then
| be growing N times faster, which causes its own scalability
| problems.)
|
| Sharding will fix both of those problems, making the chain
| into N independent shards where any given "full" node only
| has to sync some reasonable subset of said shards, and
| where a node syncing multiple shards can run those syncs
| independently in parallel (and so -- presuming a large
| number of shards -- can use as many CPU cores as are
| available.) But sharding is not done yet. So gas fees
| remain for now.
| miracle2k wrote:
| Gas fees have nothing to do with Proof of Stake or Work.
| You are not paying for the work done. They are a function
| of demand / availability for block _space_.
| miracle2k wrote:
| > Not because it isn't distributed, because as we've seen so
| much of what's required to make it work is already not
| distributed.
|
| The one thing that counts is: the ownership of the token, and
| your inviolable ability to decide who gets to have it next.
| qeternity wrote:
| Except that OpenSea can and does blacklist tokens, which
| renders it inaccessible to most of the NFT buyers given
| they don't understand how to trade outside of centralized
| interfaces (well, most of crypto for that matter).
| satvikpendem wrote:
| If anyone cares at all about said token. It sounds great in
| theory, doesn't work in practice.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| > Seriously though I believe the blockchain has always been
| hidden behind an API hosted by IBM (access to those who got
| approved and paid a fee), blockchain was an
| implementation/marketing detail and the whole thing could have
| been done with Sybase/MDB etc.
|
| Yeah, I signed up for TradeLens - this is accurate. The primary
| 'integration' wasn't worked through though. You need to have
| your customer bank and your bank accept the digital documents,
| and still you need to work through the change log process in
| case the BoL is wrong. There's a lot here to do - and I have to
| imagine this field is where Flexport is heading.
|
| I also looked into Circle to use USDC as the primary transfer
| mechanism. However the commodities I know are all a 'trust'
| relationship of international wires that works 'just good
| enough'
| texasbigdata wrote:
| What exactly does flex port do outside of the non descriptive
| marketing words on its website? Is it an oracle erp for a
| formerly pdf and paper heavy biz?
| yunohn wrote:
| Yes. Literally, that's it.
| hef19898 wrote:
| WiseTech is offering a similar solution with CargoWise.
| Among the users are, e.g., DHL.
| nwah1 wrote:
| Why convert USD to USDC and back again, and get two currency
| exchange dings, on top of the blockchain transfer fees... all
| for the privilege of still needing to trust Circle (backed by
| the sinking ship of Coinbase) when you could just do a cheap
| and simple wire transfer. Same amount of trust, but less fees
| and the trusted party is more trustworthy.
|
| Edit: Come to think of it, you'd need to trust both Circle
| and whatever cryptocurrency exchange.. in addition to your
| bank. With wire transfer you just need to trust the wire and
| your bank. So two parties vs three.
|
| Wire is actually more trustless!
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Our Letters of Credit and Document Collection finance
| charges and operational hoops were insane when starting
| out. That's the sweet spot for margin / profitability for
| the 'bank-less' transfer. Your comment correctly points it
| out that the wire is the more profitable if you can forgo
| the loc/dc costs by a trusted relationship with wires.
| surfingdino wrote:
| Global shipping is one of those industries that are yet to
| discover APIs. They are currently in awe of FTP and XML for EDI
| though the way they use it is to stuff as much as possible into
| the general catch-all tags, because they cannot agree on the
| schemas.
|
| It's the land of mainframes, T-SQL, Excel, and CSV. I have worked
| with those global players and the way they run IT project is
| appalling. Blockchain is way too futuristic for them and they
| kinda miss faxes. People who genuinely want to change things are
| frustrated, because no matter how modern their own solution are
| they have to build integrations that work with something put
| together thirty years ago, undocumented, and without any guidance
| or help from the incumbent who then proceeds to not sign off on
| the project and forces the partner to use the old document flows.
| Worry not, there will be between 5 and 7 developers in each
| meeting and the integrator's developers are not allowed to talk
| directly with the incumbent's developers. I promised myself to
| never work with those guys again.
| gbro3n wrote:
| The problem of old technologies isn't specific to the shipping
| industry, this is true for many large, long running industries
| where working systems matter. You see old technologies in
| banking and you see it in transport for example. Shipping has a
| better fitting use case for blockchain than many industries due
| to interoperability with third parties and the need for
| tracking and auditing. Maersk won't have bet the farm on this,
| I'd be inclined to see it as leading a forward looking
| experimentation with new technologies that hasn't panned out.
| m00dy wrote:
| yes, because it is not a competitive industry. A bunch of
| families dominating the whole industry.
| duxup wrote:
| Naw man the whole industry is generally backwards. It's not
| one or two companies.
| hef19898 wrote:
| So backwards that basically everyones lifelyhood can depend
| on it. So, job well done, one could say.
| cirgue wrote:
| All of this talk about IBM being incompetent is completely
| undeserved. They are probably the best in the business at selling
| nonsense to gullible executives.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They used to make really good typewriters...
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| IBM stands for Internalize Barnum's Maxim. Referring, of
| course, to a saying often attributed to P. T. Barnum, "There's
| a sucker born every minute."
| mjhay wrote:
| It seems very IBM to build a useless crypto thing with a shipping
| company.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| And why not? They still get paid.
| [deleted]
| yalogin wrote:
| The whole blockchain market is just trying to find a problem to
| fit their solution. I haven't seen a use case that actually is
| benefitted by it yet. There could be marginal advantages but that
| would mean they need to convince someone (practically a lot of
| parties) to adopt that solution so it achieves critical mass and
| people think of it as a natural thing. That is very tough to
| happen and a recession is bad for that adoption. It will be
| interesting to see how blockchain businesses pan out.
| etothepii wrote:
| The block chain hype has been fascinating.
|
| The (practically) immutable nature of a block chain is genuinely
| fascinating and arguably very novel and new but the only reason
| everyone got excited was because the value of Bitcoin went to the
| moon.
|
| I assume there is some growth hack idea here somewhere.
| Salgat wrote:
| The immutable nature of the blockchain is not the interesting
| part, and in most cases you're far better off just using
| Kafka/EventStore for that. The only revolutionary thing brought
| by cryptocurrencies was truly anonymous trustless transactions,
| and that's a very niche requirement in a world of government
| and law.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > but the only reason everyone got excited was because the
| value of Bitcoin went to the moon
|
| I'm a blockchain minimalist, but I'd say that there are at
| least 2 other reasons why blockchains are interesting:
|
| 1) A trustless, distributed digital ledger.
|
| But it turns out that _in most cases_, we are OK with a
| trusted, centralized, institutional clearing agent that
| maintains the ledger. The benefits are numerous as long as we
| trust the institution/agent.
|
| 2) An immutable record of transactions.
|
| This follows (1), though: if you trust the institution, you
| trust that there won't be a malicious mutation of your records
| and in general, because the records are mutable, they can also
| easily canceled or reversed which also turns out to be
| generally beneficial.
|
| So I do think blockchains do have some unique use cases where
| they would be beneficial (e.g. I think property (land, home,
| car) titles is a good one, car accident/repair history), but
| there are just way too many where they add no value.
| cpascal wrote:
| You still have to trust that data was recorded into a
| blockchain correctly/faithfully.
|
| So you can never truly remove trust. I'm not sure a immutable
| ledger is any more useful than a database if there is still
| some sort of required trust component.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >So I do think blockchains do have some unique use cases
| where they would be beneficial (e.g. I think property (land,
| home, car) titles is a good one, car accident/repair history)
|
| All of those use cases are subject to the Oracle Problem (you
| have to trust whoever initially put the information on the
| blockchain, and also that nothing happened later to the real
| world entity that wasn't captured on the blockchain). As
| such, they are horrible use cases for blockchain.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| There is a difference in that the trust is now distributed
| as opposed to centralized.
|
| > you have to trust whoever initially put the information
| on the blockchain
|
| In all of those cases, that trust is already inherent in
| the documents filed by the entities/institutions. But the
| thing is, they also become gatekeepers of those records
| (e.g. titles) which seems to be a great use case for a
| distributed system.
|
| > and also that nothing happened later to the real world
| entity that wasn't captured on the blockchain
|
| This is also the case with paper records; your car title
| isn't automatically tied to whether your car is totaled or
| sold. You update the record based on a change in the status
| of the material object it represents whether it is a paper
| or digital update or a blockchain update.
|
| > they are horrible use cases for blockchain
|
| I'd disagree; having an immutable record of ownership is
| valuable; especially so in countries where a centralized
| institution may not be trustworthy.
|
| Especially with transactions around something like a car
| where there are multiple entities that are reliant on the
| record (your state DMV (and multiple sub-agencies), an
| electronic toll vendor, your insurance provider, your loan
| provider, maybe your landlord for an assigned parking
| space), having a distributed ledger to access and immutably
| modify the data would be a boon.
|
| For titles on homes which are subject to liens, it would be
| a great consumer benefit to be able to access this
| information without paying several hundred dollars for a
| title search.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > I'd disagree; having an immutable record of ownership
| is valuable; especially so in countries where a
| centralized institution may not be trustworthy.
|
| The idea that the blockchain can save you in this
| situation seems like pure fantasy to me. A record of
| ownership is only useful if the government is willing to
| enforce it. Otherwise it's not worth the paper/bits it's
| written on.
|
| > For titles on homes which are subject to liens, it
| would be a great consumer benefit to be able to access
| this information without paying several hundred dollars
| for a title search.
|
| This is useful, but doesn't require blockchain at all.
| Just a public API/database and a set of legislation that
| would force use of said API. A blockchain would require
| the same legislation anyways to ensure completeness.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > So I do think blockchains do have some unique use cases
| where they would be beneficial (e.g. I think property (land,
| home, car) titles is a good one
|
| Two years ago I had a discussion on land registries. No,
| blockchain is a terrible tech for them. See comment and the
| discussion around
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564
| dist1ll wrote:
| > But it turns out that _in most cases_, we are OK with a
| trusted, centralized, institutional clearing agent that
| maintains the ledger. The benefits are numerous as long as we
| trust the institution/agent.
|
| Who is "we"? I'm not ok with trusting banks and clearing
| houses with my money. I'm vehemently opposed to it.
|
| I don't trust banks to act responsibly, and neither do I
| trust auditors to be thorough. I'll happily continue using
| crypto, with real SecOps, multi-sig auth, 2FA with hardware
| keys (and no SMS), multi-stage cold storage withdrawal with
| live self-hosted chain-analysis and no yearly account fee.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| >no yearly account fee
|
| Only true if you put no value on your own time and effort.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Finally, someone expresses it well!
| substation13 wrote:
| Indeed. Blockchain is a really clever piece of applied
| cryptography with very limited real-world use-cases.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| The real-world use-cases are already covered by git.
| chris_wot wrote:
| No, git uses a merkle tree, which the blockchain also uses.
| That's the only similarity. It doesn't rely on a massively
| distributed system to get the next time stamp for the next
| commit.
|
| Git is decentralised, not distributed. You get the whole
| git database (for want of a better word) when you clone it,
| unless you use the --unshallow option.
|
| git does not implement a block-chain.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Not all of them. There are two very specific use cases that
| it has value as:
|
| 1. A decentralised/trust-less "source of truth" for
| coordination between mutually distrusting parties. This was
| the "novel" innovation for Bitcoin and it's been refined
| with the less energy intensive consensus algorithms. Not
| everything needs this and arguably fairly few things do but
| for the projects that benefit from trust-less coordination
| as an option, I'm not sure there's a better alternative
| yet.
|
| 2. As a decentralised marketplace for a given resource. The
| most common one is the basic cryptocurrency which is a fee
| market for inclusion in the ledger. Past that however are
| Storage, Data routing (i.e. VPN or onion routing), and
| Verifiable Compute (or non-accuracy-critical compute like
| 3d rendering).
|
| Outside of those, I'd also argue it's useful for privacy
| preserving transactions (like monero, etc) but I know some
| people will disagree that that's "just for criminals".
|
| Don't get me wrong, a lot of cryptocurrency or blockchain
| projects are practically an abstraction over git or a
| database but there are a number of very useful things you
| can do with blockchains that you just can't do with git or
| a db.
| root_axis wrote:
| Doesn't really make any sense. A regular database with
| digital signatures chained per transaction gives you all
| the benefits without any of the downsides of a
| blockchain.
| substation13 wrote:
| No, it doesn't. How do you build consensus around the
| signatures?
| acdha wrote:
| The same way humans have for millennia: relying on
| authority, reputation, and auditing. Blockchains have
| enormous overhead because they're trying to be anonymous
| but once you need real-world connections you're already
| giving that up, which makes it much cheaper to simply
| rely on those existing relationships.
|
| Historically, that was things like documents being
| stamped or sealed by a trusted third party witness,
| escrow agents to hold funds or property until some
| transaction finished, auditors confirming that a
| particular good was in the expected condition, etc. In
| every case, anonymity would be a negative because you
| want to know, for example, that your notary doesn't have
| a criminal history or a reputation for sloppy record
| keeping.
|
| In the electronic era, that could be implemented using
| PKI where different parties register keys (or more likely
| corporate CAs) and use those to sign transactions or
| witness having seen a particular record. That's similar
| to a blockchain in terms of trust but orders of magnitude
| more efficient and robust since it doesn't require a
| network connection to a complex distributed service.
| root_axis wrote:
| What does that mean? The signatures are self-describing,
| you don't need to build a "consensus" around them.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| How do you agree on which signatures or information are
| actually part of the database? How do you decide who gets
| to add new entries to the database?
|
| Unless there is some meaningful method for maintaining
| the current state and each atomic change to that state
| going backwards, you are losing security guarantees.
|
| You can go down the git route but history is trivially
| rewrite-able and while git is decentralised, it has no
| mechanism for coming to a consensus about which history
| is the right one.
|
| Now you are back to determining consensus. You can either
| just say "X is the authority" and use a hosted git repo
| but if that's not viable for your threat model, you are
| pretty much back to cryptocurrency style consensus
| (probably Proof of Stake or Proof of Authority depending
| on your threat model).
| root_axis wrote:
| Proof of work is slow, wasteful, and provides no benefits
| to the proposed problem (chain of custody tracking).
| Proof of stake makes no sense for this use case because
| there's nothing to stake. "Proof of Authority" is
| effectively just a centralized DB.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _trust-less "source of truth" for coordination between
| mutually distrusting parties_
|
| This only works if everything of value is on the
| blockchain. Otherwise, the oracle problem makes regular
| databases a better solution.
| qznc wrote:
| The "decentralized" is not a requirement. For example,
| nobody really needs a "decentralized marketplace". They
| just need a "marketplace".
|
| Mediation and arbitration are well known methods when
| trust is missing. A joint venture with a database can do
| anything the blockchain community built more efficiently.
| tokai wrote:
| Weirdly they are stilling hiring developers.
|
| https://www.tradelens.com/careers
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Someone forgot to turn off the lights, probably.
|
| Or maybe, maybe, they actually need some hands to migrate stuff
| onto some other solution.
| samwillis wrote:
| Colour me surprised.
|
| I don't think I have yet heard of an industrial use of bock chain
| technology that would not be better and more easily solved with a
| "traditional" database.
|
| There has been so much talk of using it for supply chain tracking
| and inventory, but it only gives you more problems to solve.
| Ultimately you need someone to be the "authority" in business
| transactions, a platform built on a decentralised block chain
| would still need that for any of these logistics problems.
|
| Even when you look at crypto currency use of the block chain, the
| vast majority of transactions are happening off chain on a
| traditional database via an exchange.
| subradios wrote:
| Everything would be better, but nobody would want to build the
| platform. Supply chain is a cartel industry and the present
| cartels aren't interested in new entrants.
| qznc wrote:
| DNS aka NameCoin is still the best use case in my opinion. Even
| there, the current centralized "everybody trusts ICANN" works
| well enough.
|
| It would require a situation close to WW3 such that China
| decides to create their own top-level registrar maybe. Then the
| EU does a third and then the world splits into chaos. Then
| NameCoin could arise as a neutral viable alternative. Looks
| very unlikely to me.
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