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IBM Technology

IBM Completes Blockchain Trial Tracking a 28-Ton Shipment of Oranges (coindesk.com) 86

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
IBM recently completed a trial of blockchain technology to track a shipment of mandarin oranges from China to Singapore. From a report: Announced last week, 28 tons of mandarin oranges, or 3,000 cartons containing approximately 108,000 fruits, were delivered ahead of Chinese New Year celebration on Feb. 5 (mandarin oranges are a symbol of prosperity, IBM explained). The main shipping document, the bill of lading, was recorded on a blockchain. This document serves as a proof of ownership of goods, as a receipt of goods and a contract of the shipment, and normally it's mailed to all parties involved in the shipment, including banks providing trade financing.

For the pilot, IBM created an electronic bill of lading, or e-BL, which helped reduce and speed up administrative processes "to just one second" as the document flow is automated, the company claims -- while the standard paper-based procedure takes five to seven days. "By using the e-BL, we have seen how the entire shipment process can be simplified and made more transparent with considerable cost savings," Tay Khiam Back, the chairman and CEO of fruit importer Hupco, said in a press release.
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IBM Completes Blockchain Trial Tracking a 28-Ton Shipment of Oranges More

IBM Completes Blockchain Trial Tracking a 28-Ton Shipment of Oranges

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  • Consensus vs Authenticity (Score:3)

    by DickBreath ( 207180 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @02:17PM (#58074624) Homepage
    Only if you think Consensus beats Authenticity. I'd somehow feel safer having signed documents where I can verify the digital signature, and trust the certificate chain. Even if the parties pre-arrange to use self-signed certificates.

    Or maybe use the Consensus approach to Generate your self signed certificate, thus avoiding any CAs. That is a lot less computational work and waste of resources. You only generate your certificate occasionally. But you could use it to sign much more frequently.

    • Most blockchains incorporate both Authenticity and Consensus. Each transaction must be signed with an appropriate private key to be considered valid. Consensus is there to resolve conflicts among otherwise valid transactions.

      • Blockchains depend on 'work' for authentication. If you can do more work than the work that was done to sign a document then blockchain is useless. Bitcoin works because nobody has enough computing power to beat the system.

        How much computing power was dedicated to this shipment of oranges? How much computing power could possibly be dedicated to the hundreds of millions of shipments that happen every single day? Nowhere near enough, that's how much.

        This whole thing is a sham, just marketing people playing wi

        • So much computing power. I'll bet Blockchain technology was invented by both electricity suppliers and computing equipment suppliers.

        • Blockchain != Bitcoin

          Bitcoin uses a blockchain and consensus but there is no fundamental constraint forcing anyone to use both together.

        • Blockchains depend on 'work' for authentication.

          Authentication in blockchains is based on private keys, not "work". Short of brute-forcing the private key—which would undermine any cryptography-based system—no amount of processing will permit you to spend Bitcoins for which you don't already have the key.

          If you can do more work than the work that was done to sign a document then blockchain is useless. Bitcoin works because nobody has enough computing power to beat the system.

          The work required to sign a Bitcoin transaction is trivial. The infamous 51% attack is an attack on the consensus algorithm, which determines which (valid) transactions to include in the blocks and which block is currently at the tip of the b

        • You are confusing blockchain with bitcoin mining. They are completely different things.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jblues ( 1703158 )
          Not if the 'work' was work that would actually happen, on computing platforms like Amazon Elastic Cloud, Lambda, Microsoft Azure, Google and so forth. In the past currency was Rum. In the future currency will be CPU clicks.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      When it comes to food, should system be required by law to be manual. Electronic well, a solar flare is an inevitable guarantee and doing this, just caused say between 10,000 and 100,000 people to starve to death. Serious decision need to be made, else failure will be catastrophic and right now decision making is blinded by unadulterated psychopathic greed.

  • Centralized blockchains === Data base (Score:5, Interesting)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @02:19PM (#58074638)

    block chains either have to go to a central authority or they have to be distributed among a limited set of nodes that that sync to maintain the longest chain.

    If you want it to be secure then I think that you either have to use a very expensive hash and pay the Miner (like bit coin proof of work) or you have to limit this to a distributed set of miner nodes that use a shared secret.

    one of the other has to be in place I think because otherwise anyone coutd forge the chain if it's free to hash and not a closed set of trustee nodes.

    Since were talking oranges , individually, then you need the cheap method with a centrally authorized set of approver nodes.

    But if you are going to have such a centralized authority. Why not a regular old fashioned database?

    I just don't understand what is special here about the block chain.

    It does have some robust aspects of syncronizing a distributed set of approver nodes by consensus (longest chain wins). But that isn't really special and can be done with databases that synchronize too.

    • It's git for everyone else (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Basically, the rest of the world is going to start recording their transactions in git repositories.

      It provides compounded verification and cryptographic authentication (e.g. commit signing).

      However, nobody would understand "IBM completes Git trial". In fact, people might be offended. The cool word is "blockchain".

    • You can't go back and forge early documents at a later point.

      You can't go into the DB and just decide to edit a port of origin as all of the metadata that goes into a record also depends on all of the metadata prior to it.

      Give me root access to your databases and I'll make your products show up from anywhere in the world. What happens when Orange company gets sold and Orange2, Inc wants to scrub any incriminating data showing Oranges from region X caused cancer? Edit the database.

      If you can figure out how t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        I suppose the question is how much corruption/fraud requires a party to go back and modify records rather than falsifying them in the first place.

      • Sure you can. You can write whatever you want in a block chain. The only restriction is that to make everything line up, you have to recompute the hashes for all the subsequent blocks. Thatâ(TM)s not hard either.

        Now, if you publicize the data, someone might catch you doing it. Just like they would if you published a blog entry or tweet you regretted and deleted it.

        Block chains arenâ(TM)t magic.

    • but if I had to make a wild guess I'd say it lets them offload some of the database processing to external "nodes", e.g. to another company.

      Think about how much computer time costs for a large database. Now imagine if you could shift that cost to somebody else...

    • There is a lot of difference between a blockchain consortium among a fixed set of semi-trusted parties, and a centralized database.

      In the former, the parties trust each other, but only as far as they can throw each other. The network is full of competitors and those who could see substantial if fraudulent transactions could occur in their favour.

      This is why Blockchain has a large advantage over a central database for this kind of scenario - not only are all the transactions on the chain and immutable, the c

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ras ( 84108 )

      Since were talking oranges , individually, then you need the cheap method with a centrally authorized set of approver nodes.

      Well done - that is exactly what it is. The thing IBM is hyping is called appropriately enough Hyperledger [ibm.com]. They call it a "permissioned blockchain", which has about as much in common with the blockchain bitcoin uses as "permissioned rape" has in common with "rape".

      To be fair to IBM, it is probably useful thing in this context. As others have pointed out, The Bill Of Lading Electronic Registry Organization (BOLERO) already does something very similar, and it is useful. Hyperledger is just a chained of

  • System is only as good as its weakest link (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @02:28PM (#58074694)
    And in this case, the weakness will be linking the blockchain to the physical goods. Anyone can still crack open the container and steal oranges during transit. A drug smuggler can still swap a shipment of oranges with a shipment of drugs by switching the labels. And the delivery guy can still take a snapshot of your package on your porch as "proof" it was delivered, then load it back up into his van and take it home.
    • Or the guy with the password to the orange wallet might suddenly die, and the oranges won't be accessible any more.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 )

      They can already do all of those things today. This system is still many orders of magnitude faster and saves a lot of money.

      You're tilting at windmills here.

  • How does a blockchain entirely owned by one company (IBM) guarantee the transaction an immutable transaction history? Is the code open source and available to be run / scrutinised by others?

    • Re:Stupid? Or incomplete? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @03:04PM (#58074894) Homepage

      It doesn't. Blockchain is one of the most over hyped technologies of the last two decades. There are some things where it might be useful but most of the time these companies are just using where a standard database would work just as well. Sometimes better. This is one of those times.

  • I can easily imagine that a heavily-stage-managed and custom documentation process would be way faster than the lowest-common-denominator legacy paper arrangement; but I find it much harder to understand why the 'blockchain' based updated electronic records process would be faster or more efficient than a similarly updated electronic records process that's based on some boring database instead.

    It's easy to compare updated processes against legacy ones and get good results(especially given that there are
  • Isn't this just an electronic document? Couldn't you just put a QR code on the containers that linked to a copy of all the paperwork online, or fire a trigger that good have been received? Once the code is scanned at its destination an email of the documents are sent to all parties that the good have been received. You also log the ip address of the device making the web request as proof that it was done on the dock (or receiving warehouse, maybe include a pin that has to be entered as well).

    If you wan

    • Isn't this just an electronic document?

      Yes, but no. This is a golden marketing moment.

      It doesn't matter that the entire system could be built better using traditional databases, better by many metrics including development costs, maintenence costs, and security. This is not about the documents being used.

      This is about the marketing potential. The press headlines that the masses will not understand outweigh the development costs. All the masses see is "IBM is using a magical new technology and is on the cutting edge, you can't go wrong by pick

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by bob4u2c ( 73467 )
        Ahh, so sorry for the confusion. Please feel free to continue marketing speak.


        BLOCKCHAIN, BLOCKCHAIN, BLOCKCHAIN

        p.s. As for the issue of trust, don't they use some kind of escrow? And if they do, wouldn't escrow handle all that?

  • BOLERO (Score:5, Informative)

    by nickovs ( 115935 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @03:09PM (#58074920)

    The Bill Of Lading Electronic Registry Organization (BOLERO) has been allowing shipping companies to use electronic, cryptographically secured bills of lading for more than 20 years. Unfortunately they don't use !!!BLOCKCHAIN!!!, so obviously the IBM solution is the only real alternative to using paper Bills of Lading.

    • Horse and buggy was used for centuries.. but who needs innovation.

      • IBM's innovation is replacing a horse and buggy with a buggy and horse, and calling it new technology.
        It's still just a scam meant to separate people from their money, with absolutely no added value in return.

  • For their next demonstration they are going to track a shipment of apples (the fruit). This will allow them to claim that chain has conclusively proved that you really can compare apples to oranges. (The next press release.)

  • I'm sorry the 90s called and they want their "e" back.

  • mandarin oranges are a symbol of prosperity, IBM explained

    That needs to be explained? By IBM?

    Everything is a "symbol of prosperity" in Chinese culture. There isn't anything in Chinese culture that doesn't come down to being about wanting to have lots of money.

    • Donâ(TM)t be silly. Only half the things are symbols of prosperity. The other half are symbols of death.

      • Even in death, we burn fake money as offerings, as though money is still important in the afterlife. Even the symbols of death are also about money in the end.
  • It only delivered "approximately" 108,000 fruits.

  • ....and we've been using express B/Ls (ie no originals "mailed" anywhere) since you had to fax them before email was a widespread thing.

    When original docs are required, ie for a letter of credit, they still use consigned BLs to really they're docs that bottleneck the PAYMENT chain, not so much the goods at all.

    As far as proof of ownership, perhaps some people use them in sketchy parts of the world, but "to order" BLs that *actually* are a negotiable title to the goods...I haven't seen one in at least 20 yea

  • 5-7 days? (Score:3)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @05:22PM (#58075744) Journal

    "...For the pilot, IBM created an electronic bill of lading, or e-BL, which helped reduce and speed up administrative processes âoeto just one secondâ as the document flow is automated, the company claims â" while the standard paper-based procedure takes five to seven days...."

    Um, BLs are required to be produced within 48 hours of sailing, and that's been the standard since at least the 1980s. Usually it's less than that, and in fact with the implementation of ISF carriers are forced to issue BL numbers (the key bit) BEFORE THE VESSEL HAS EVEN SAILED (ISF is only relevant to the US, but I believe this process has ended up speeding BL# issuance worldwide anyway).

    And a vanishingly small % of any shipments are issued with paper BL's anyway. I haven't seen a BL in the MAIL for 15+ years.

  • OK, so they created an e-BL and stored it on a blockchain. Whoopee, I can do that with my toy Multichain setup in 30 seconds. Now what?

    How many participants were on that blockchain? Was the transfer of custody of the oranges recorded via asset transfer on that blockchain each step of the way? Was the e-BL used as a contract document by legal entities who received it via the blockchain, and did a bank connected to the blockchain use it as proof of collateral, as the article implies?

    Because there have bee

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