this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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Reminds me of Blockchain
It's not a fake or fundamentally useless technology, but everyone who doesn't understand it is rushing to figure out how they're gonna claim to use it.
Yeah, when someone just describes blockchain, saying "I guess we could use it for supply chain tracking or healthcare tracking or whatever" is a reasonable first impression.
The problems show up the second you start thinking about how to actually implement the damn thing. You don't need a blockchain for logistics or healthcare tracking. It has no inherent advantage over regular databases. It doesn't solve organisational issues. It's just a slow trustless distributed append-only database. It's good when you need a trustless distributed append-only database! Most people don't need one.
Same thing with AI technologies, just a bit different in that it's somewhat more useful. They're good and useful technologies and they have plenty of perfectly valid usecases. Then the tech bros started going "Maybe we could use AI for some weird wacky obscure niche and charge a lot of money for it?" or "we're going this wacky crap whether you want it or not, we don't care what it's necessary for us to do to make it happen, and we'll charge a lot of money for it".
https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-to-solve-supply-chain-challenges
So: A company had a problem with invoices. They made an invoice management system. The problem was solved. Wow. Never saw that coming.
Without the details, it's hard to see how blockchain specifically was the magic ingredient. Not saying it wasn't, just saying this was already a problem that was solved long before the blockchain.
The invoice management system is owned by the whole supply chain. It is not a database run by walmart.
The problem wasn't solved before blockchain because centralized databases do not have the administrative flexibility to respond to a changing supply chain. A central administrator only sees one layer deep.
What if - hear me out - you build a centralised database, and then give appropriate access to all of the actors in in the system? Like most people have been doing forever?
And isn't updating one centralised system actually more flexible than trying to manage a distributed system? Changes can easily be rolled to production when you only have one system to worry about.
What if the actors don't know they will end up on your database? What if they decide to sell the end product to someone else? What you want to access the database of someone else without needing read permissions?
No, because this centralised system is tailored to one particular stakeholder.
Oh yes. Centralised systems are faster cheaper and easier to maintain. But they are untrustworthy, inflexible and dominated by a single stakeholder.
I had to rewrite this because it got eaten by the browser. Sorry if this appears as a duplicate or something.
The whole point of the system in question was that the relevant invoice information is stored in the database. Doing business with companies generally involves clearly defined contracts. This is an organisational issue, not a technical one, and blockchain doesn't solve it.
If you mean that this system is harming the other company's ability to engage in business with others, that company is only required to use the system to do business with the company that implemented this centralised system, because that's the big company's way of doing business. If you mean that selling end product to someone else would violate some kind of contract, that activity is happening outside of the system to begin with. This is an organisational issue, not a technical one, and blockchain doesn't solve it.
This is a design issue, not a technical one. Nothing prevents designing the centralised system in a way that information is available to parties that need it. Nothing prevents the other company adopting a policy that such invoice information is publicly available. Blockchain doesn't help or hinder this either way.
But nothing prevents it being tailored to all stakeholders. Again, this is a design and organisational issue, not a technical one, and blockchain doesn't inherently fix this. In traditional business systems, if some of these stakeholders have special requirements, these can be bridged over through interoperability, rather than building an unified distributed system. Invoice numbers go a long way. There's a reason why DBAs spend a lot of time thinking about primary keys and unique identifiers.
Disagree about the latter two and I already addressed them. Trustworthiness is, again, a thing that blockchain doesn't solve. "Trustlessness" only guarantees data/transaction immutability, it doesn't guarantee organisational problems like fraud (as cryptocurrency market demonstrates). And if you don't trust a company in organisational sense, why do business with them to begin with?