<story><title>Blockchain: A Better Way to Track Pork Chops, Bonds, Bad Peanut Butter?</title><url>https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/business/dealbook/blockchain-ibm-bitcoin.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>Seems to be hype from MBA types who&amp;#x27;ve lost the technical knowledge. Or perhaps never had it.&lt;p&gt;What is blockchain? It&amp;#x27;s a way to create a global ledger without trust.&lt;p&gt;What do you need to track your pork chops? A ledger.&lt;p&gt;What is IBM? A huge, trusted, corporation.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone think if IBM operated a bog standard database of pork chops that the users would not trust it?&lt;p&gt;Every few months I&amp;#x27;m reading these articles about using blockchain, which is pretty clever, for something that doesn&amp;#x27;t require it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SkyMarshal</author><text>IBM might be able to do this as long as they&amp;#x27;re not also trading in the same markets that are running on their supply chain database.  Fwiw JP Morgan tried to create a global supply chain database back in the 80s but it never took off.  Few parties were willing to give JP Morgan such a clear view of their operations and the overall market, knowing that whatever it saved them in efficiency and better trade financing, JP Morgan would find ways of extracting value in the markets, likely at the participants&amp;#x27; expense.</text></comment>
<story><title>Blockchain: A Better Way to Track Pork Chops, Bonds, Bad Peanut Butter?</title><url>https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/business/dealbook/blockchain-ibm-bitcoin.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>Seems to be hype from MBA types who&amp;#x27;ve lost the technical knowledge. Or perhaps never had it.&lt;p&gt;What is blockchain? It&amp;#x27;s a way to create a global ledger without trust.&lt;p&gt;What do you need to track your pork chops? A ledger.&lt;p&gt;What is IBM? A huge, trusted, corporation.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone think if IBM operated a bog standard database of pork chops that the users would not trust it?&lt;p&gt;Every few months I&amp;#x27;m reading these articles about using blockchain, which is pretty clever, for something that doesn&amp;#x27;t require it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cloakandswagger</author><text>IBM, JP Morgan, et al. are developing private blockchains with the aim of cheap, semi-distributed consensus and uniformity. That is what it provides over an SQL database.&lt;p&gt;Take for instance the options contract market. Let&amp;#x27;s say you have a pool of 50 trusted brokerages and financial institutions that rapidly trade these contracts. The current solution is each entity has their own custom, internal tracking system along with either a centralized service that they all communicate with, or inter-party connections. In either case, this is fragile, highly expensive to build and maintain and is often slow.&lt;p&gt;The blockchain isn&amp;#x27;t a miracle technology like these articles portray it as, and IBM, JP Morgan, et al don&amp;#x27;t see it that way anyway. It is a convenience tool for a more robust ledger that will lower costs for trusted inter-party transactions.</text></comment>