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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: 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.