Comment by anonymouse008 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymouse008 | Hacker News Reader

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> 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'

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!

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.

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?

Yes. Literally, that’s it.

WiseTech is offering a similar solution with CargoWise. Among the users are, e.g., DHL.

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