IBM and Maersk Abandon Ship on TradeLens Logistics Blockchain (coindesk.com) 28
Maersk and IBM will wind down their shipping blockchain TradeLens by early 2023, ending the pair's five-year project to improve global trade by connecting supply chains on a permissioned blockchain. From a report: TradeLens emerged during the "enterprise blockchain" era of 2018 as a high-flying effort to make inter-corporate trade more efficient. Open to shipping and freight operators, its members could validate the transaction of goods as recorded on a transparent digital ledger.
The idea was to save its member-shipping companies money by connecting their world. But the network was only as strong as its participants; despite some early wins, TradeLens ultimately failed to catch on with a critical mass of its target industry. "TradeLens has not reached the level of commercial viability necessary to continue work and meet the financial expectations as an independent business," Maersk Head of Business Platforms Rotem Hershko said in a statement.
The idea was to save its member-shipping companies money by connecting their world. But the network was only as strong as its participants; despite some early wins, TradeLens ultimately failed to catch on with a critical mass of its target industry. "TradeLens has not reached the level of commercial viability necessary to continue work and meet the financial expectations as an independent business," Maersk Head of Business Platforms Rotem Hershko said in a statement.
A bit confusing (Score:1)
Re:A bit confusing (Score:4, Funny)
iceberg dead ahead
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I'd give it the Funny if I ever had a mod point to bestow. Slashdot needs more Funny these years...
Has there been anything useful on the blockchain? (Score:5, Interesting)
For awhile there it seemed like every other company came up with some brilliant idea that was "Existing Thing... BUT WITH BLOCKCHAIN!" Have any of them actually panned out to be something useful and innovating or have they all just been an extra step in a process that added nothing useful?
Re: Has there been anything useful on the blockcha (Score:4, Insightful)
No. But people keep trying. As a concept it sounds nice on paper. No implementation has been useful in any real world, legitimate purpose
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I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I have yet to study a problem that can best or exclusively be solved by using blockchain. Near as I can tell, it remains a technology in search of an actual purpose.
Paint it "amusing" (since it isn't moving), but I'm sure not going to salute it.
Re: Has there been anything useful on the blockcha (Score:3, Insightful)
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I had a student do a BA on supply-chain security. Turns out traditional approaches are better in all regards.
Again (Score:2, Insightful)
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A blockchain is a database, one that you use when you need to store a little bit of data that doesn't need to be updated very quickly, you want a lot of people to be able to write to the database, and none of them trust each other or you.
Those characteristics are potentially useful in, uh, well, maybe a monetary system if you're willing to give up everything else you want in a monetary system in order to avoid public regulation.
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Yeah. That's the problem. A blockchain is just a hash tree (which is useful all over the place) plus a distributed trust model for updating it. Distributed trust only really works when you're distributing over a very large number of impossible to herd cats, and is also massively expensive. So the only remotely plausible application I've heard of is currency, and that one is pretty much a bust.
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A blockchain is a database
A write-only database.
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Bull. You can re-write it just fine, you just have to rewrite everything downstream at the same time, and if you want to put in anything that's signed you need the keys or the cooperation of the key holder, but that's generally true of anything signed.
Keeping Secrets (Score:3)
No surprise here. These companies love to keep secrets. They believe that if their customers (the public?) knew their capacity/pricing v. competition then they lose.
My guess is that they could actually gain & handle some smaller orders (esp. max-out the ship), but they want only big orders (many shipping containers).
Amazon reached the same conclusion . . . (Score:3)
Key quote: “There are many among Amazon’s senior engineers who think blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.”
AWS Blockchain [tbray.org]
"Failed to catch fire" (Score:2)
One of the hallmarks of a solution in search of a problem.
Interesting (Score:2)
Ironically one of the few instances where blockchain would actually make sense. Multiple parties doing globally distributed transactions in a way that all parties could keep historical tamper proof records.
It probably made it too hard to cover up international incidents from auditors so they had to scrap it.
It's also interesting that blockchain isn't available for consumer food safety. Scan your grocery UPC and manufacturing codes and have access to where it was processed/grown/butchered/etc. But I guess
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That's funny because for thousands of years people used paper and literally signed or stamped written transactions. It appears you wrote your tiny little program for nothing.
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This wasn't "but on blockchain!" (Score:1)
This was about ensuring that everyone in the supply chain could verify everyone else's efforts.
Not everyone wants their supply chain interactions visible to their competitors. Ford tried something similar.
Without that, it's just a single-supplier thing all the way through. That rather defeats the purpose of competition.
What Maersk was really hoping (Score:2)
The usual problem (Score:2)