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Submitted via IRC for ErnestTBass
When railroad tracks were first laid across the western U.S., there were eight different gauges all competing to dominate the industry – making a nationwide, unified rail system impossible; it took an act of Congress in 1863 to force the adoption of an industry standard gauge of 4-ft., 8-1⁄2 inches.
FedEx CIO Rob Carter believes the same kind of thing needs to happen for blockchain to achieve widespread enterprise adoption.
While the promise of blockchain to create a more efficient, secure and open platform for ecommerce can be realized using a proprietary platform, it won't be a global solution for whole industries now hampered by a myriad of technical and regulatory hurdles. Instead, a platform based on open-source software and industry standards will be needed to ensure process transparency and no one entity profits from the technology over others.
"I think we're in the state where we're duking it out for the dominant design," Carter said during a CIO panel discussion at the Blockchain Global Revolution Conference here. "We're not an organization that pushes for more regulatory control, but there are times regulatory mandates and pushes can be incredibly helpful."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @12:12AM (12 children)
How helpful is the gross cpu power to do? Makes package move faster how? Why not 1d and 2d scan codes? Why not RFID? It is fully touch free and omi directional.
Why not first fix taxing and addresses. They are one on n the same. One controls the other make the transport industry be the final and correcthandler then that is off everyone’s back.
Blockchain? What is the question it is trying to solve??
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @12:26AM (9 children)
Custom clearance... Replacing the paperwork with a tamper proof ledger
(Score: 5, Informative) by Fluffeh on Tuesday April 30 2019, @01:22AM (6 children)
It also allows for non company specific "Your package is here" type information to be easily and publicly available.
Currently, the only way for an customer wo track their package from end to end is if the parcelo is picked up and delivered by the same company - and that limits things GREATLY for most packages which are sent via normal post. With a simple blockchain interface, it would make an openand relatively secure way to enable interfaces to all track a package from start to end and it would be able to be picked up by a postal service from one country, shipped and given to another postal service for delivery in a country - all the while having tracking and accountability of the parcel.
They are using this sort of blockchain in supply chains already for supermarkets to track meat. Customers want to know things like "Where is this steak from?" and with this, they can track down to a farm level where the meat in the package comes from.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @02:01AM (2 children)
Might as well embed a GPS chip on every address label.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @02:19AM
Only when UK outlaws Steaks will they add GPS tracking to all their meat so you can't back Beef without Loicent. So wait till 2022 or there about.
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Tuesday April 30 2019, @03:00AM
That's the point. You can do it with a GPS chip that has to send data back somewhere, have that owner of the data make it available and free for all other worldwide postal services to enable/embed in their systems... or... you can have a blockchain and an item number - and everyone is free to implement in their own time and way - and there's no need for any expensive telecoms equipment, you just scan in and out as you go.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday April 30 2019, @08:41AM
The system would still be informal, in the sense that it doesn't guarantee anything. It would only allow to partially assign responsibility, e.g. in the case of package loss.
Otherwise not much would change: the customer still has to check whether the package is actually there and if it says the meat comes from a certain farm, there is absolutely no guarantee that it is actually from there. The problem lies in the fact that an abstract label is signed instead of the content. As content is actually physically handed over there is no possible protection from tampering. Consider the meat: it can be swapped at any point in chain, the packaging can be perfectly replicated using the sample at hand. Going fancy, the producer could sequence the DNA of the meat and sign that and provide that as meta-information in the blockchain. However, that could also be tampered with (although with some effort). For other types of products it seems difficult to come up with something unique, non-spoofable.
The only thing blockchain would offer is an API: how to exchange information on deliveries. That could be achieved by many other means as well and much more efficiently so.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday April 30 2019, @08:51AM
I'm sorry, but that's complete bollocks. Not one of any of the packages I can remember receiving in the last decade was handled end-to-end by a single company, and yet I've been able to track all but one or two (Australian couriers, apparently, don't use barcodes the way the rest of the world does, for example).
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @08:53AM
so why not use barcodes? rather than enforcing a particular type of blockchain, enforce a particular type of barcode/QRcode standard and then you're done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @02:35AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hartree on Tuesday April 30 2019, @02:41AM
"Replacing the paperwork with a tamper proof ledger"
So, is this like the paperless office with unforgeable digital documents that we were all promised so many years back?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @12:27AM
Monorail!
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday April 30 2019, @02:51AM
Essy: "how can i convince shareholders andinvestors to let me spend lots of money?"
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex