Cargill open-sources Splinter, its ‘blockchain-like’ supply chain software
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For a merchant to use Shopify, connected to Stripe, connected to Visa, working with me, it’s relatively “easy”. Not many people involved in the process and some of them (me) don’t have any power to control how the flow works.
When Cargill ships a 100,000 MT parcel of grain to be processed, there are SO many people and organisations that touch the commodity in some form. From inspection companies like SGS, to rail lines, to customs authorities, to port representatives, to ocean transportation, to banks....the list goes on. And historically the vision has been an “all or nothing” style of platform.
One day we will figure out the solution to this problem, but not anytime soon and probably not with Splinter. Four of the world’s five largest grain companies, three of the world’s five largest iron ore companies, and many more use the product that I work on (www.SEDNA.com) to manage their global supply chains, and their workflows remain to be very email-based and driven by traditional ERPs.
You see this in action with businesses like Flexport who started with a very formidable vision to build a platform for third-party logistics, and ultimately had to pivot to become a very digital freight forwarder after being trapped by the traditions and slow-moving nature of the industry.
In these organisations there is incredible buzz and thought around digital transformation, but many of these companies are also only recently beginning to trust cloud software. So although there is a big desire to innovate and operate on the cutting edge, so many primitives and so much of the day-to-day process keeps them lagging behind.
Agreed that it's only part of the supply chain compared to what you describe, but it was a major change that affected a very large amount of processes and businesses.
The scale of things such as worldwide supply chains makes you wonder whether competition is really the right catalyst for efficiency. Cooperation and the setting of standards seems to be a better answer, but of course this leads to a whole lot of different issues.
No proposal for better IT integration in freight comes even close to that level of saving, mostly because the existing chaos is "good enough" and the executives are very, very old and very conservative compared to "digital natives".
If anyone is interested in learning the history of this, a good book (2e: ISBN 978-0-691-17081-7):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
It really took off during/after the Vietnam War as the Pentagon saw its benefits in efficiency and not having to use Old School longshoreman and switching to cranes.
Makes me wonder what seemingly obvious thing we're not aware of right now that will be commonplace 50 years from now.
It removes many of the barriers to competition and reduces the risk of large players creating monopolies.
I think it’s fair to say that much of what we see in tech is deliberately engineered to avoid standardisation in order to protect competitive advantage.
Wired did an interesting article on standardisation years ago.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.wired.com/2002/01/standar...
Containers have big downsides too... but technology allowed costs to be vaporized with containers.
The other big thing is that containers appeared in the US as the railroads entered their death spirals. You can build a dock anywhere and have trucks show up from 100 companies quickly compared to the negotiation required to live railroads. Think about how quickly the NYC maritime business died and moved to New Jersey... that’s a market that represented ~10-15% of the US population at that time.
The first picture in the Wikipedia article is what I mean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphora .
and 99.9% of those people are a joke and don’t even realize it. commodities traders are the most gullible lot I’ve ever encountered, chasing a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. they’re so dumb as they cannot tell reality from fiction.
Ya know, here in the US we just found out that nearly have of our population and our last president have this problem. Maybe they should move into trading commodities?
Think of it like real estate agents, but without even the bare minimum of the license. You have people with no marketable skills, no formal education, no success at anything else all chasing commissions. Its going to be a circus.
The guard handling the paperwork asked me "Are you able to sign online?"
I desperately tried to come up with a snappy "yep," it sounded like such a good idea. But I finally had to say "I'm not sure what you mean."
He handled it, gave me my bill of lading, and away I went with toilet paper in tow and paperwork in hand. Because it's still not finished until the paperwork is done.
So your stereotype for "trucker" has to be resilient to the occasional former nuclear physicist or mathematician showing up.
I was a B-player, and past my fresh date. I stumbled around a bit, and wound up here.
I like it. I haven't been in a meeting in three years, and my commute is three feet. Right now I'm in California on I-5, looking at Mt Shasta floating above the clouds.
I get paid to look out the window.
The Cargill branch in my area lost at least $3M to embezzlement by an accountant who just paid phony or stretched invoices for years, which gives you an idea of the risks associated with paper and excel processes combined with lean staffing and lack of controls.
Compare that to fully digitizing. Will cost many more millions in procurement and training.
There are advantages to digitizing. But until they’re really transformative, conservative industries won’t budge. And they won’t budge until the benefits of going fully digital become so large that a competitor/startup comes along and realizes these benefits and kicks their asses at which point they too need to transform or die.
This really is the crux of the issue. It comes down to “your ERP has some information I want in my ERP” - followed by twenty emails, redirects to find the person who actually understands the schema of the ERP on each end, mapping the fields, and finally sending the info.
What’s missing is not some omniscient decentralized master system, but a standard framework to rapidly conduct data negotiations between private parties and systems. Each party needs a public-facing searchable data catalog of some kind so requests can be made precisely the first time, and so each party understands what they’re agreeing to.
What is the difference? You seem to be recommending a protocol (maybe with some level of human involvement) between two centralized systems. OK now that sounds more like federation than decentralization, but still, there's not much of a distinction.
But, wow! Is it hard to get your competitors to adopt an open protocol. Whole bunch of NIH syndrome. And each player can sit on the sidelines, or invent their own "protocol" and not adopt another (que that XKCD about 14+ standards).
Converstaions: A: our clients want to work together, so our softwares should work together. B: Yea, well, how many clients do you have? A: Well how many do you have? B: Use my protocol, we'll build a spec. A: here's our protocol with public spec & moderate adoption. B: Well, we didn't get to have input so we don't like it, you're clearly not a team player. A: It's on Github! I'm literally inviting you to participate right now!? B: ...
It's very hard to build open, distributed, federated systems when all the other parties in the game are more interested in building up their own walled garden.
For those unfamiliar, people have been trying to solve supply-chain communication issues since the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange
The hard part is not technology. It's getting a zillion players to agree on how to use a technology together. To the extend that "blockchain [jazz hands]" ever mattered here, it was only the chance that the tidal wave of hype might sweep everybody in the same direction.
But I think the core value proposition of blockchain to supply-chain like situations is to solve the problem of "who's version of the database do we trust", without needing to resort to escrow or other 3rd parties. It won't completely solve the problems of parties being in disagreement - lawyers will still be needed, but it might address a subset of problems.
That looks like waste to the "blockchain [jazz hands]" crowd. But it prevents other wastes. Like trying to get a whole industry to come to consensus on ontology and process. Or trying to comply with systems build around that fantasy process when local needs differ from the standards.
A blockchain (not proof-of-work, but permissioned/BFT-based) is pretty clearly the optimal way to have an irrevocable digital trail.
But you can encode fulfilment into a smart contract for physical goods, assuming that those physical goods have some digital representation on-chain. Discrepancies between the chain and the real world continue to be resolved through the court systems in various jurisdictions, but on-chain activity is just strong evidence that any court can rely on.
> a distributed ledger only has value over and above a non-distributed one if other parties worry about the centralised database manager tampering with records
An alternative viewpoint is that a centralized database manager can be seen as a potential risk. One of the general ways we progress in society is when we reduce sources of risk, and a permissioned blockchain where you need 2/3rds of a cabal to collude is a pretty clear reduction of risk compared to a centralized DB. (I mean, how would you keep track of whether a central DB has been tampered with? You'd probably maintain your own copy, reconcile the two periodically, and flag discrepancies if and when they happen. That's exactly what a blockchain is.)
To be clear, I'm pretty skeptical about blockchains in general, but this seems like a very compelling use case.
But why would I want to? Unlike a smart contract for some verifiable code-based outcome it doesn't offer any guarantees I get paid, which I still rely on the courts for, it just adds complexity and unfamiliar risk.
> An alternative viewpoint is that a centralized database manager can be seen as a potential risk
Sure, in theory it can be. But relative to all the other potential supply chain risks, the ERP cloud vendor colluding with a part of the supply chain to remove records from or silently update a datastore is pretty near the bottom of the list in terms of likelihood, expected cost and chances of it not being glaringly obvious to other parties and used as evidence of bad faith on their part in court.
To be clear, I'm not saying blockchain can't be used as a datastore, I'm saying that overall its about as useful for mitigating supply chain risk as insurance against your spouse committing identity fraud is for mitigating potential problems with marriage.
Moreover, I think one of the big problems with "blockchain [jazz hands]" is what you're doing here: a solution looking for a problem. The right way to build something is to start with actual problems actual people have and then find the most economically efficient technology that best fits the solution. When approached from that perspective, I still haven't heard of a case where a blockchain turned out to be the right answer.
I agree that a distributed ledger could under very specific circumstances protect against some very specific types of internal fraud. But again, that's the wrong way to look at it. The way to do it is to look at actual fraud problems that businesses are actually having and then see what measures, technological and otherwise, best mitigate the problem.
Even if the fraud in question was of the very specific type where somebody fiddles records after the initial write (as opposed to fiddling them before, or on output, or making offsetting transactions, or any of the many other ways to hide internal fraud) I still wouldn't try to set up some sort of multi-organizational distributed blockchain ledger. I'd just write a regular ledger to some immutable medium. E.g., AWS's WORM solution. [1] That would not only be simpler, clearer, cheaper, and more thoroughly vetted, it would also be very easy to prove compliance with the sorts of standards used to prevent fraud.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/protecting-data-with-am...
Blockchain or smart contracts have no way to solve this without abandoning the decentralized and permissionless aspects, at which point you’re giving up loads of efficiency for none of the benefits.
This is the problem that every large non speculation based blockchain problem has encountered: any system will be reduced to its weakest link. Any problem that requires crossing off chain into the real world will necessarily lose many of any benefits blockchain can provide.
Blockchain really only solves a few specific problems in a few specific domains. There’s a reason that a decade on, all we’ve managed to build are massive casinos that can’t be shut down by authorities
https://stories.mightyearth.org/cargill-worst-company-in-the...
Can anyone summarize?
Or just check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill#Criticism
hREA is aimed at creating a radically inclusive supply chain system. It is fully open source and being developed here: https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea
This is a fun intro: http://mikorizal.org/futures.html
I presume it's getting open-sourced now because they've given up on the idea of closed-source domination of the industry, and this is the hail mary attempt on the part of the technologists to save the project, or at least to have something good on their resumes by the time the project funding runs out.
principles/values based innovation anchored on open tech / open standards / open governance being a better path for these types of solutions. because the alternative is what? entire industries locked into commercial solutions til death do us part? sounds bad.
written in rust :D