I read an article today on wine, alcohol and supply chain and rolled my eyes.
Things like "…that solution is blockchain…Big companies like Walmart and large grocery stores are already using blockchain to manage supply chain management especially when it comes to food. "
No, no they really aren't. Most of these big companies are actually full of it. They were full of it in the early big data and hadoop days. They are full of it with the AI and machine learning and data science marketing pitches. And they are definitely full of it when it comes to blockchain. Many do test. Many don't have the time, resources or care. And many don't even like new potentially disruptive Technologies. Ever.
Decentralized blockchain? Yeah Wal-Mart and Amazon and the big banks are all for that. Not. They are more for testing private permissioned centralized blockchains. And really there is some need for a system that doesn't give all the transaction information to the world. Transportation and logistics and suppliers have tons of deals and contracts.
Maybe in due time things will change, but Wal-Mart isn't showing the world how cheap or how difficult it is to negotiate with them. Or worse , for the vendors, partners and Distributors, killing their price points and value.
So when people on medium or other social media platforms start writing how it's all changing, maybe they should dig a little deep and provide actually facts and evidence of this.
In theory these things are great, in reality the Wal-Mart's of the world aren't going to productionize a public decentralized etherium based blockchain system. In fact Wal-Mart partnered with IBM and made two patents for some kind of "blockchain".
We know Wal-Mart tried to build their own payment system before and it sucked. They tried to build their own Netflix at one point too. Now it seems they want another logistics like payment system and a blockchain that will act like a database.
It doesn't solve any problem though. If Wal-Mart controls the Walmart blockchain system, that defeats the entire purpose of a decentralized immutable ledger. And why would any one trust Wal-Mart or IBM?
All we see are many of these big firms jumping on the bandwagon and trying to create another version of a centralized controlled system. And patent it no less, so it's not even open source. But the clickbait articles jump on this nonsense.
https://medium.com/@jpvehovic/craft-beer-blockchain-32f52feaa31c
