Maersk/IBM to discontinue TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled global trade platform
maersk.com
maersk.com
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.
You mean, they won't even bother selling it for parts? Or why is this sarcasm?
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.
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.
I was trying to be sarcastic!
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 :)
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].
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'
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!
> 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.
But well as the other guy points out, seems like the bottleneck that creates scarcity is the single thread processing of transactions which I wouldn't have guessed, apparently the network is still actually that overloaded despite the speedup of not having to brute force the final hash thing.
The amount spent on electricity in PoW is determined by the reward not the other way around. And from what I gather the same applies to PoS, except that, instead of spending electricity, virtual tokens must be deposited somewhere, but again the amount that will be spent on these tokens is determined by the reward that the depositors expect to get.
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.
There should still've been a massive speedup to block confirmation, no? I thought that the final mining part had to be applied to an already computed block, which would be sequential.
Block times on Ethereum were already very long compared to other Ethereum-alike blockchains, to reduce the impact of mining processing on throughput (i.e. if block time is 10s, then you only need to deal with mining overhead once per 10s period.)
Combined with the fact that people were spending exactly as much on GPUs to accelerate this process as profit margins would allow, and you'll find that not that much wall-clock time was really being spent per minute on the sequential bottleneck of mining. It's the aggregate CPU time that was being spent on mining that was economically and ecologically damaging.
The one thing that counts is: the ownership of the token, and your inviolable ability to decide who gets to have it next.
Throughout this process, you retain possession of your token - which again, is the thing that matters.
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.
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.
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.
There are hundreds large ports in this world, and when ship transport your payload, owner MUST communicate with many govt and private structures.
And these structures are not friends to each other, remember, for example one of channels is nationalized by Egypt govt, near it strait owned by Turkey, and they are not in war state just now, but near, and they all don't love US, and from time to time make nonfriendly actions, and could achieve US sanctions.
And complex software needs good communication with vendor.
Now imagine, how consultants from same US company will work, when one country is US ally, but other is under US sanctions? - Communications will be extremely hard.
Open protocols and decentralization give perfect answer - nonfriendly countries will use blockchain, which is not owned by any subject, so they have not any reasons to block communications.
If the US wants to sanction country A, and country A uses a blockchain to circumvent sanctions, what do you think will happen next? The US goes: "ah, blockchain, foiled again!!!"?
Is any blockchain really resistant to country level attackers? I highly doubt that, especially against the US.
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).
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?
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.
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?
Basically, unless you are able to get over 50% of the hashrate (or over 50% of the amount staked) you will be expected to make the most money by properly packing as many transactions into the block as you can (or more accurately packing in the set transactions that will net you the largest transaction fee). If you try to cheat your expected mining income will be less. For example if violate certain protocol rules no other node in the network will consider you block valid, so you get zero for your mining effort.
Deliberately trying to mine based on an old block is technically legal. But the odds of your deliberate forked block becoming part of the longest chain is far less than the odds if you mine on top of the latest block, so again, it is in your economic interest to mine on the latest.
Deliberately refusing to include valid transactions from specific users in the blocks you mine is possible, but (assuming those transactions have a large enough transaction fee to be sensible to include in the block) you are economically better off to include it, since otherwise one of your competitors will include it in a later block and get that money you lost out on.
That is really the whole idea, to make it so that the economically rational thing to do is the correct thing. Now the system isn't perfect. if you can get over half the miners/stakers to collude with you, breaking some of the rules can become the more profitable approach. (and for some systems the relevant attack ratios could be larger or smaller than 50%, but the basic idea stands).
The other part of the puzzle is that that collusion is a sort of prisoner's dilemma. Other people are not likely to want to join with you to collude unless they are pretty sure you will be able to get a large enough fraction of the hashrate to join with you, as otherwise they are risking making less money by joining with you. which is to say that the non-colluding case is a Nash Equilibrium.
I don't see an obviously way to employ such an economic self interest approach against a single centralized server.
Why is that not the case for Visa or any other centralized entity? You think there's a world in which they incorrectly process transactions and end up wealthier?
Like you can keep re-explaining how proof-of-work functions (and trust me I get that), but why is it better than centralization?
Foe example they could cause transactions that go to some startup company they consider a threat to their business model to fail some of the time, causing damage to the entity by making them seem flakey/unreliable, or costing them money in having to provide other payment options, or ask customers for payment again. Or they could fuck with payments to big businesses in certain countries in an attempt to manipulate exchange rates in a way as to maximize profits as reported is USD, etc.
Alternatively it is very possible that in some cases VISA may decide to act in ways that don't maximize profits. This may sound surprising, but it is extremely common. First of all, companies operating on incomplete information will sometimes make decisions they think will maximize profits, but that actually wont. Or you get plenty of CEOs that decide to pull off dumb stunts to try to boost this quarter's numbers to better match analysts predictions, at the cost of reduced future profit. Companies are often sufficiently opaque that such things are not always immediately obvious.
This is especially problematic for something like VISA, which gets to arbitrarily set the network rules. It is not like your business can just say, ok then VISA, I'll send transactions for your cards over the MasterCard network instead.
Having a system that gets processed by a large number of different mutually distrustful entities helps avoid all this. It is unlikely that all or even most of them will view your startup as a threat. There will most likely be at least some that really are trying to maximize profits. And among those with slightly different goals (which are usually still somewhat of an approximation of maximizing profits), it is unlikely that a large majority, will deviate from expected behavior in exactly the same way (if they do, it would effectively be some of that 50+% collusion, even if it was accidentally rather than deliberate). The rules for the network cannot be arbitrarily changed on the whims of a single central entity.
For somebody running a business, who does not particularly trust that some American run Card network wont fuck with their transactions, a crypto based payment network could legitimately look far nicer. They can more reliably predict the behavior of the network with respect to a transaction they send/receive. The network does not have a lot of arbitrary rules, and those rules don't change very often. Foreign governments you don't trust are less likely to be able to meddle in your transactions, etc.
And to be clear, I'm no crypto shill. Realistically it gets used for wild speculation, scams, illegal or frowned upon transactions. There are some (but big picture still not all that many) legitimate entity to entity transactions not tied to somebody using crypto as speculative investments. I see that "Smart contracts" (which are neither smart nor contracts) while interesting are still deeply flawed, and realistically have limited uses not better performed by centralized systems. Etc. And all of that is not even considering the environmental caused by the use of work.
So I just rely on economic incentives then? Because I can do that centrally too.
You said if I were to use contract then don't use crypto?
I'm saying if crypto relies on economic incentive, then what's decentralization have to do with that?
What does this have to do with decentralization?
So your argument is that the internet would be better if instead of the cloud, we had a bunch of tiny datacenters dispersed around the world?
Didn't we do that for like the first 20 years of the Internet (you know, when it was a way way worse experience)?
And couldn't a centralized operator do that anyway? Don't you remember how unreliable bittorrent peers were? You want to go back to that?
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.
Lots of communication needs to happen from shipping companies like Maersk to the party the shipper has contracted to pick up the container from the port (trucking companies, barge operators, train operators). One solution to this would have been a shared digital platform where the shipper could've granted access to the hinterland transporter to get updates about the container arrival, and to be able to cryptographically prove they are authorized to pick up the container. Whether this is an actual blockchain or something different also leveraging cryptography and distribution, I personally don't really care about. For the non-tech savvy people in the business, I'd call this 'blockchain' just to get it on the radar.
The other solution to this handover problem is trying to force shippers to book the hinterland transport included in the sea transport, so Maersk would arrange that bit. This is called carrier haulage, CFS-CFS, or door-door transportation. This approach seems to be what they have settled on, and all the major shipping companies are investing aggressively into the hinterland parts of their business.
Now imagine you're running a trucking company focused on ports (I think in the US this is called drayage). You've gone from 50 customers down to 3. At the same time major carriers are making record profits and have been explicitly exempted from the antitrust laws based on an argument of economies of scale in ocean shipping. Looking at it through this lens (pun intended), yeah, I'm a bit worried.
If you were a shipping company, would you go with the technical solution, or would you try to get more of the entire process under your control so you can just strong-arm the hinterland parties into doing "the correct thing" ?
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.
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.
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.
I'd love it if the discussion could get more concrete. For example, what's a specific case of international trade fraud that a blockchain could have prevented, and why is a blockchain needed to prevent it?
https://corda.net/global-trade/
Trade Finance 101 - two companies in very different parts of the world want to trade for some non-trivial sum of money, e.g. buying a shipment of goods. You'd think this would be simple but it's really not. The two parties often do not actually trust one another, in particular they may have very little visibility into mundane things like the insolvency risk of their counterparties. This is an actual problem because in the physical world you can't atomically swap things for money, so someone is going to have to either pay first or deliver first. If you pay and then the seller doesn't deliver, that may cause you to go under. If the seller ships and you never pay, ditto in reverse. So the importer may go to their bank and request a "letter of credit", which is basically a form of escrow in which the importer's bank will guarantee to pay on presentation of proof of delivery e.g. bills of lading. They may also help arrange things like a maritime insurance policy, they have expertise in how to handle shipping disputes and so on. Often the importer's bank will send these documents direct to the exporters bank because the exporter may need a short term loan to cover the cost of actually making the goods. But the exporter is just receiving literally a bundle of physical documents in many cases, and the loans in question can be large, so they are vulnerable to document forging. Forged trade finance documents are actually a major source of AML problems and fraud.
Then you have to actually ship it. That's more documents and payments to the shipping companies, to get your goods cleared at customs, dealing with freight forwarders etc. And so on and so forth. Long story short: documents everywhere, most of which aren't even in any sort of real data format (e.g. PDFs are common) and some of which aren't even in computers at all, depending on where you're dealing with!
In the world of enterprise logistics there are very few properly digitized systems, because it's very hard to get everyone in the world to agree to just use some arbitrary SaaS app. You can try, and companies like Flexport are doing it, but the players in all of these transactions are (a) very conservative, and (b) very reluctant to lock in something as fundamental as their ability to import/export to the fate of some random American VC backed startup. And for good reason! Imagine if they'd all jumped on board such a company but instead of a US firm providing the centralized SaaS it was, for example, Russia. Now imagine the global trading SaaS has an outage, or gets hacked. Or simply raises prices.
So what to do? The actual answer settled on by the world's trading and logistics people is ... do nothing. Stick with the faxes and couriers. Or at best you get an ad-hoc patchwork of individual systems between specific counterparties.
Enter the enigma called "enterprise blockchain" or sometimes distributed ledger technology. These platforms may or may not actually have blocks, chains, proofs of work or tokens in them. The one I designed (Corda) has none of these things albeit there's a "tokens framework" if you want to create such things on top of the core. What these platforms are actually trying to do is provide standardized mechanisms for:
1. Inter-firm identity (fairly standard X.500 PKIX in the case of Corda)
2. Inter-firm messaging that isn't SWIFT (AMQP+client/server TLS in Corda), and really you also need inter-firm state machines and protocol frameworks (the "flow framework" in Corda, which uses a JVM coroutine library).
3. Serialization of signed data structures (AMQP+extensions)
4. The really hard bit: signed, irrefutable inter-firm transactions with data integrity, with some reasonably acceptable level of privacy. Think P2P tables, stored procedures, foreign key constraints and so on but in which you're not allowed to actually show the full transaction to anyone at any point including the tx ordering subsystem.
The latter part is where the blockchain-y aspects enter the picture although in reality they don't normally use proof of work or stake. In Corda it's pluggable and some projects just use Raft. Others can simply use an RDBMS to provide 'double spend' protection. And there's also a BFT plugin I think, although I'm not sure if it ever launched (they're doing a big rewrite of the platform at the moment). It's pluggable because what we found is that participants often had rather complicated trust models in which they were very concerned with things like data integrity losses due to mistakes/botched upgrades, passive adversaries (competitors, foreign governments), not so concerned with active adversaries and very concerned with availability/DoS attacks of various kinds including political DoS. This makes sense given their environment, in which everyone is identifiable and basically follows the law but competitors may be tempted to 'peek' at data they weren't meant to see, and governments may be tempted to just ignore laws for geopolitical advantage sometimes.
In an ideal world all this would be standardized and there'd be an ecosystem of vendors selling different implementations. In practice even just figuring out a design that all the different players can accept was a very hard challenge, making it work was harder still (decentralized asynchronous upgrades in particular were practically a research level problem), and Corda went the "open core" direction so other firms could just build off the open source code and data structures instead of having to re-implement it all from RFCs and other loose spec documents. That seemed to satisfy people.
So anyway that's the background to these sorts of projects. They do make sense but are very hard to make work due to the massive variety of players, hard technical challenges and complex commercial/geo-political concerns.
I have some nitpick of course :)
> just build off the open source code and data structures instead of having to re-implement it all from RFCs and other loose spec documents.
It's never "just". What you're providing are exactly lose specs. E.g. "Serialization of signed data structures (AMQP+extensions)". What are the data structures? What do they look like? Which extensions? What happens if someone doesn't support all the extensions?
RFCs and standards however bad they are exist for a reason. And even then people implement them poorly, or not at all.
> hard to make work due to the massive variety of players, hard technical challenges and complex commercial/geo-political concerns.
Unfortunately, in this list technical challenges should go last. For all the reasons you described in the first half of your message :)
One of the possible reasons for TradeLens demise is that they choose to ignore them and came up with their own data structures (Json) i.e. partners that are usually EDIFACT capable had to practically start from scratch to comply with TradeLens format.
At some point TradeLens realized that and started partially accepting EDI feeds, but it was too little, too late I guess.
breach of trust is indeed a major problem and it erodes the social contract and technology could obviously play a positive role. not by creating inflated hypes that are only good for management consulting fees though...
I think this take is either a bit disingenuous or possibly just misinformed. There are very few people who don't want 'government money' because it comes from government and government bad.
People want money that isn't associated with government because they believe, among other reasons, that having access to the levers and dials that fiat currency provides corrupts the government (as a system), the government (as in the people who govern), and the markets that they govern over. Time and time again governments have shown that they lack the ability to responsibly operate those levers and dials so a growing number of people are suggesting that maybe that shouldn't be something we put into a small cadre of human hands.
This is a little bit like if we had a government-regulated medical system and the government decided to make heart medicine very expensive because the rate of population growth was too high and we needed to slow down the biological market, only to panic 5 years later and make birth control cost 500 times as much and all other medicines free when the population growth got too low and then repeat that cycle forever, all the while turning a blind eye to a parasite class that profited from these cycles.
There is no intrinsic reason why the financial system could not be organized and, where required, regulated with the same (in)competency or transparency or checks-and-balances as any other domain of equal importance. To accept this can't be done is to imply that the particular parasite class benefiting from the status-quo is more of a parasite than others. This doesn't feel to be the case. In the scheme of things there are worse leeches, some in plain sight.
The naivete and total inadequacy of cryptocurrency as an alternative financial system is exploding right as we speak. While it had (maybe) some limited use signalling to the status-quo that "they should behave - or else" - see e.g. CBDC, the exploitation and betrayal of countless individuals with fake promises will ultimately only further entrench the notion that there is no alternative to the parasites. That is sad.
It all loops back to building trust networks and enticing individuals to participate because they will be better of and not screwed by insiders. This cannot be enforced magically by numerical algorithms and blockchains. It is a contract by and for humans.
You further suggest that cryptocurrency is somehow 'exploding' - crypto dollar prices routinely 'explode' up or down because it's very, very small and it's new enough that gullible people are quick to dump buckets of money into the ocean of scams that exist and they inevitably evaporate, taking that money with them.
That's not a feature of 'crypto' and it doesnt mean that crypto is dead - I wish I had a little bit of ETH for every time crypto was 'dead' - cryptocurrency is fundamentally just the idea of a a decentralized bookkeeping algorithm, with different details on how you keep that book. A lot of people suggest to gullible investors that the best way to keep that book is to trust a small group of people to keep the book for you, which is of course a recipe for disaster and is no better than just having a MS excel spreadsheet on my computer. The results are predictably 'explodey'.
The serious crypto projects, meanwhile, just continue development. There are enormous communities of people who sincerely believe in the promise of a future with permissionless programmable money. These people were working a decade ago, a year ago, a week ago, they'll be working tomorrow.
Another post suggests that everyone interested in crypto is interested to make money. I can't help that they've only been exposed to people looking to make a quick buck but I think it's safe to say in most human activities many of the people involved will be trying to find a personal benefit in as short a timescale as possible. In the same way, in most human activities there will be a core group of people trying to change the world around them for the better. Crypto is no different.
My main point (restated in the ethics context) is that there is no reason why ethical standards should be lower in finance. In a sane society that is not ripping itself apart in theft and exploitation all critical systems (and finance certainly qualifies) must benefit from a similar level of good governance. We de-facto trust each other on countless important matters and our focus and efforts should be on the cases where this trust is betrayed. A technology that is built on the premise of a trust-less society is at best a monumental waste of human talent and at worst deceitful and malevolent.
Every single crypto enthusiast I know, builder or speculator, has converted crypto to fiat riches, and dreams of wealth. I have yet to meet someone who lives frugally and keeps their wealth in volatile crypto coins.
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.
Vertical integration offers way better profits than cooperating with intermediaries, and the ultra large logistics giants want to make as much profit as possible.
I didn't expect it be said out loud like this!
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.
So... they successfully built the solution, but then failed to build a suitable problem for it?
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.
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.
Link: https://www.singaporeair.com/en_UK/es/media-centre/press-rel...
I guess the users must use their secret key to sign the connection form "anonymous" blockchain address to a normal userid in a database.
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
Isn't employment at highest rate ever? At least that's what I keep hearing.
Just today (paywall, German): https://www.zeit.de/politik/2022-12/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.
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?"
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.
I started my original comment above with "Here in Germany...".
As for current income data, it does not really matter at all?
Because whatever the current level is, it's not part of my argument. It's about the market mechanism - higher demand should lead to higher wages. The dynamic behavior, the price changes. And we don't have that, even if you can show some increase, it's nowhere near the changes in demand. In many sectors.
The argument was, if there really is a shortage, since we have a market, we should see or have already seen significant increases in compensation to signal the truth of such claims. We have not, not even close, for many years.
The only kind of jobs where compensation increased far far above inflation was - the very top levels of management. Citing a statement from https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/manager-gehaelter-...
> Führungskräfte haben ihren Gehaltsvorsprung laut eine Analyse der KfW zwischen 2010 und 2020 weiter ausgebaut. Ihr Gehalt stieg in zehn Jahren um fast 27 Prozent – auf fast doppelt so viel wie der Gesamtdurchschnitt aller Leistungsgruppen.
Translation of the main point:
Managers compensation between 2010 and 2020 increased about twice as much as the average of all groups.
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.
Maybe his point was valid?
Clearcase does cost licensing money for the company though and also time in onboarding new grads who are already familiar with git. Git is also supported out of the box by all the CI/CD and modern dev tooling. Getting tools to work with Clearcase is a wasteful effort.
So I can't see how his point would be valid in any business sense other than stubbornness.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
This comment sounds right: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33802411&goto=threads%...
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.
The phrase used to be “nobody got fired for buying IBM”
These days IBM sell so much snake oil, I think heads should roll whenever someone purchases whatever fad-hype-junk IBM is touting and it turns out to be nonsense
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.
Or maybe, maybe, they actually need some hands to migrate stuff onto some other solution.
Then again, many a CIO I’ve worked with could be at least labeled as uninformed, or largely informed by those selling their silver-bullet products and services.
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.
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.
This only works if everything of value is on the blockchain. Otherwise, the oracle problem makes regular databases a better solution.
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.
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).
Proof of Stake makes sense here not because you are implementing your own PoS system. Instead you are using an existing system and checkpointing onto it. This changes trust assumptions (now trusting the network to operate properly) and isn't the solution for all projects.
Proof of Authority also makes sense and isn't just a centralised DB. Instead it is giving trusted members of the community some fraction of the total authority and requiring a majority of the members to agree on the state for the system to progress. This is similar to but still distinct from distributed database consensus algorithms like Raft or Paxos. The primary distinction is that Raft & Paxos assume that all authenticated participants are fully trusted/non-malicious.
Byzantine Paxos (and Byzantine Raft as proposed in some research papers) begin to address this by attempting to achieve Byzantine Fault Tolerance but they each make different trade-offs. Even then however they tend to lack the flexibility that some types of PoA can have in allocating trust (think of PoA as PoS where the stake is units of trust allocated to each authority).
What it comes down to IMHO is that while blockchains are clearly a terrible solution when you definitively trust an organization to operate in good faith, they are still better than a lot of the alternatives when everyone doesn't fully trust any one participating org but they do collectively trust all parties to be mutually distrustful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Only true if you put no value on your own time and effort.
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
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.