Blockchain doesn't map onto the real world goods
People who are constantly banging on about blockchain in the supply chaiin, forget that it doesn't really map onto real physical goods without some massive changes to the supply chain. c.f. the romaine lettuce scare in the US recently.
Just because you can prove on the blockhain that something was done, doesn't mean that it really was, or that the item supplied wasn't substituted en-route. There's nothing stopping a bad actor from swapping out the goods for something inferior (c.f. ebay scams with empty boxes etc). Blockchain doesn't help with that problem. It might work for some use-cases (diamonds are an example?, it's heavily controlled and they have the data points to uniquely identify the origin of diamonds) but these are rare and far between.
Lets take the example of soya that is destined to be animal feed (probably to pigs, which are processed into something tasty at the appropriate time). If there was a food scare and your favourite supermarket wanted to know how the hell contaminated soya made it into their "finest bacon sandwiches"...
There are a lot of actors in that particular chain, the soya farmer, the harvester?, then the port authority, the shipping, then the distributor in the UK, the feed processor (cos they do add additional "nutrients" right), then the pig farmer, the abattoir, the people who turn pork into tasy tasty things, and finally the supermarket. There's probably more than that, so at least 10 different actors which probably means at least 10 different backend systems (if any). Every one of those would have to somehow participate in the blockhain public ledger; which is certainly possible, but I can't see a farmer in China really giving a toss about doing that, they're too busy farming (ditto the UK pig farmer, IT isn't their focus).
However, the problem isn't changing the software that manages the supply chain, the problem is *how the soya is stored*. Basically a harvest truck comes in and dumps its soya into a massive silo, that silo might be for everything that was harvested for Brazil in the past week. This happens first at the port prior to shipping to the UK, and then again at Harwich (or Milford Haven; choose a port), and then at the feed processor again; prior to mixing.
Lets say that random testing has found that Batch 47B of supernutri-mix made on the 12th/Never was contaminated. It's going to a tall order for the feed processor to be able to determine to any level of confidence which farm / region that the soya came from regardless of what the blockchain tells them. They might be able to track it to which delivery they got from Harwich, but further back up the chain?
So,blockchain; it's brilliant at focusing us on the wrong things. Sometimes it's not a technology problem, it's a people & process problem.
Anon; cos all companies need to have a story on blockchain...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
