[1] https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-t...
The product looks like any other web app. Is it really using a blockchain somewhere at the backend to store something? May be. It is certainly using some standard RDBMS to store the structured data. There's no way you can store all of that you see in the screenshots on a blockchain.
So what it is that is actually being stored on a blockchain? Not clear.
Is it possible that they use the word blockchain to get free PR? May be. I don't want to judge.
The product page doesn't have the word blockchain anywhere. https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/asset-track
DL Freight, the product used by Walmart Canada also doesn't mention the word blockchain anywhere. There is just one mention of a shared ledger. https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/asset-track/dl-freight
Did find blockchain on this page https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/ecosystem
But immediately you see this
"And because its built using distributed ledger technology, every transaction is 100% auditable, immutable, and visible only to permissioned users – helping to create a genuine layer of trust between the parties that transact on the platform." It refers to permissioned users, so it's not a blockchain. Which is supposed to be permissionless. They aren't even claiming. They are calling it a distributed ledger.
In fact I have noticed this even with R3 Corda. The enterprise blockchain provider. They use the term distributed ledger to describe their offering, not blockchain. But all the marketing material and PR pieces always tout blockchain in the headline.
If something is permissioned, trustful and centralised, is it even a blockchain?
Trucks, warehouses, resellers, manufacturers, all with their own systems and problems can record to the same ledger reliably.
People just forgot that these things can be done with boring old technology in the excitement of doing something hip and cool.
Lots of end clients that go offline often and need to resync.
The merkle tree part of blockchains is absolutely valuable here… but that’s kind of where it ends. There’s no real consensus mechanism when there are 'merge conflicts', it needs manual overrides.
It’s more like git than bitcoin – and it helps them for similar reasons to why git helps us even when there’s a canonical source. People go offline and can’t sync immediately to the master store; people want to write events down now and deal with discrepancies later; disagreements are reified and can be formally reviewed, etc.
As best I can tell, it seems other aspects of blockchains just came along for the ride. The best open source code for their use case included it, and using it was better than building from scratch. The decentralisation is all but coded out – the central authority is the only one that can authorise transactions or resolve a 'merge conflict'.
A public truly distributed PoW blockchain is slow and inefficient by design. It's a feature not a bug. A private, permissioned, controlled blockchain is pointless. So I really want to know what are these companies doing when they use blockchain for supposed benefits.
Blockchain in supply chain is often the most publicized use case. It somehow assumes that since blockchain is immutable (actually it isn't) whatever you add to it is authentic. Using it for supply chain assumes that a supplier won't lie about the origin or if they employed child labor. Using a blockchain doesn't automatically guarantee any of these.
I mean, the truckie could always put the wrong value in when he entered it.
Another advantage is that you immediately see if an entry in the ledger has been dropped due to a network or other technical error, which can be a problem if you’re running a complex state machine on the data. I once helped a company build an IoT product where that was a problem. I pitched the idea but got absolutely no traction. I think the mistake I made was not calling it a blockchain, but just said I wanted to include hashes in the messages, so it didn’t sound sexy enough. I don’t like blockchain hype either, I didn’t care about being public, distributed, having proof of work or consensus, I just wanted to know if and when a message had been dropped, which is apparently too much to ask.
Also I think the vendor of the actual device didn’t understand what message authentication was, so they wouldn’t have been able to make it happen on their end. Their idea of security was just encrypting the data, but making no effort to ensure who it came from. I also think they wanted to use DES, which had already been broken for a few years at that point.
In supply chains, there's a lot to be said for having a paper trail even if (or especially if) some of the papers are fraudulently written.
Without an immutable shared database standard, it's difficult for processes like that to cross company lines. And supply chain is a fancy phrase for processes that cross many company lines.
A supply chain involves 3rd parties who have nothing to gain from this. If the issue is the middle man between A and C, blockchain isn't solving any problem. The distrust is with B, having a blockchained backed paper trail doesn't provide anything a database gives you right now.
You're asking for a single source of truth between A B and C. And saying you cannot trust A B or C, so you want blockchain to solve it, which needs to be created by someone, so you introduce D and now you have a central governing body who dictates everything for A B and C. Or you are A and you say 'hey B and C, you need to use this system we created cos we don't trust you!'.
Blockchain solves nothing in the supply chain.
Anyways the reason why it's immutable is that it's public so everyone knows every transaction. You can just have a normal db and maker it public. Blockchain is overkill in this case.
Also this is a much more niche problem than "supply chains"
But nobody designs a process like that.
The only thing "blockchain" about what Walmart has done is riding the absurd investor hype for anything with blockchain in the title.
again, a solution looking for a problem.