On two occasions I have been asked, — “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
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Citation needed I think.
What makes you think Walmart trusts its employees any more than it trusts its suppliers?
The major advantage I can see (and I’m by no means an expert on either logistics or blockchain) is that it is possible (with hindsight granted) to see exactly who lied to you (or simply gave you incorrect information) about what and when.
It is also of course SHINY AND NEW!™ which has an attraction all of its own…
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I have no reason to suspect that Walmart trusts any of its employees in particular; but in systems of any scale(a Walmart logistics bit certainly qualifying) you tend to try to minimize what your employees can screw up(even if you trust their integrity implicitly the “good to minimize the number of people who could hose the system with a typo, good to have logging so that risky areas can be identified, good to have backups so that you can um-hose the system” rules still apply; if you distrust them and consider it likely that at least some are skimming from the till or engaged in kickbacks fraud with suppliers or the like, then your least-privilege, logging; and having them watch one another are likely to be even more stringent).
Perhaps more importantly, block chain arrangements have exactly the same type of issue: they can provide robust(though often rather specific and less broad than naively assumed) assurances about the behavior of things between ‘parties’ using the protocol; but the question of what the access control, logging, credential handling, etc. situation behind the scenes of a given party’s actual implementation of their client and storage of their keys is totally outside the security model: could be impeccable; could be that a malicious insider has the run of the place(and if he has the relevant keys he is the party for the blockchain’s purposes); might be that a remote attacker is the one pulling the strings, that happens frequently enough.
With either a standard database or a block chain thing Walmart will have to put a number of controls in place for the collection of people and systems involved to count as a reasonably unified and trusted entity, and that isn’t trivial; it’s just a problem common to both options.
There’s nothing about the design of block chain arrangements that makes ‘party’ equal ‘specific person’ for the purposes of protection provided. Bare minimum, humans can’t really do it in their heads so ‘you’ are actually a piece of user agent software (hopefully) representing your interests as ordered; and if the logistics of getting everyone in the lettuce production chain set up with their own little keystore module are as obnoxious as I expect they are the parties involved here are almost certainly closer to organization level(unless ridiculous amounts of additional manual scrivening are planned probably some ERP system feeding already partially chewed data into the new blockchain add-on).
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Sidechains?
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