We are republishing this editorial from Jutta Steiner from Provenance:
“Every physical object we buy comes with a story: a journey of people, places and materials. But these stories often remain hidden in sprawling, complex supply chains and the information presented to consumers is rarely more than marketing that can mask sad truths.
Now, more and more consumers are demanding genuine transparency on where and how their products are made. Recent regulation in the EU requires companies to publish more information about their supply chains, with measures to ensure adequate punishment for those who do not. But even with increased consumer awareness and new regulation, ensuring the authenticity and transparency of a product’s chain of custody has proven difficult.
A new technology, called blockchain, has great potential to fix this. A blockchain is a shared database that is secure, open, auditable and runs without a single centralised operator. Specifically, blockchains enable users to transfer digital property to each other across expansive networks in a way that is safe, verifiable and prevents any party from altering or challenging the legitimacy of the information being exchanged, making it a promising tool for bringing greater transparency to complex global supply chains.
The key to transparency is the decentralisation of data, meaning no single party can control what is seen. Indeed, we have long tried to entrust a range of third parties with the running of systems tracking and overseeing supply chains — without success. The truth is, no single third party can make supply chains more transparent. Having one party (or a small collection of cooperating parties) overseeing this creates an inherent bias and weakness in the system. If that party is the brand itself, or the most powerful actor in the supply chain, there is a major conflict of interest. This could lead to selective disclosure since the party monitoring the information is also responsible for its bottom line. If supply chain data were gathered by a third party, this party would have to be totally disinterested, yet incentivised enough to maintain the system, making them and their operations a vulnerable target for bribery, social engineering or targeted hacking.
On the other hand, using blockchains will bring transparency to supply chains, allow consumers to make informed purchases and empower governments to quickly and easily request reliable information related to even the most distant supplier. Indeed, blockchains will entirely change the game for certifying, tracking and tracing the origin of our goods. Such a system can provide confidence around key attributes of purchased goods — such as ethical standards, origin and authenticity — all easily verified through a smartphone-readable QR-code or RFID tag embedded in the label of a t-shirt or engraved into the underside of a piece of jewellery.
Huge benefits for customers will emerge from the secure guarantee of a true chain of custody, along even the most complex supply chains, at a very low cost. And, as we look to the future, if we are to avoid the mistakes of the past that have led to the on-going environmental and societal atrocities caused by opaque supply chains, ‘Made in’, ‘Made with’ and ‘Made by’ must all become the values by which products are judged. This paradigm shift is already coming, but it will be blockchain technology that truly sparks the revolution.”
Trying to figure out how to think about this. While they are vague about it, looks like they are building on Ethereum. Which I like much better than bitcoin (but see caveats below).
I sent an email a few days ago to ask if they are open source. No response so far; thus, so far, I doubt it. Most of the blockchain stuff is open source, and most of the serious security stuff is. So if they’re closed, it’s a big downgrade.
I can see how it might work, though. I know you can track the provenance of a single asset (resource) via blockchains. You can read about that here, about tracking diamonds. That was the first credible use of blockchains that I ever saw, except for currency speculation and criminal activity.
But Provenance promises to track processes with their resource inputs and outputs, as well as the history of a given resource. They want to attract large corporations. They want to track every economic event with barcode readers, RFID thingies, etc. They want each economic event to be digitally signed. So some agent (presumably a business) will digitally sign the log of a process and its inputs and outputs. And all of that will exist in the Ethereum blockchain.
I think that is all interesting. Even ingenious. Might even work, within some boundaries.
But my questions about that whole scenario include:
Doesn’t that give you a hard dependency on Ethereum and its singular blockchain?
What if the other events in the provenance graphs were digitally signed and logged on some other blockchain?
Can we do better with signed Linked Open Data on the open Web?
Would love to get some answers from Provenance.org, or just somebody who understood Ethereum and blockchains better than me.
But here are some totally open ways to track provenance and thus supply chains:
Open Provenance
PROV
I think those could be digitally signed and traced on the open Web, not needing blockchains. But there’s probably no way to monetize it…
P.S. for those of you who know what I am talking about, provenance uses pretty much the same graph structure and traversals as value equations.
P.P.S. Just got a response from Jessi of Provenance, who says “Currently our code isn’t open source – but we plan to make it so in the future. Although our Ethereum contracts are by default – as they are on a public blockchain…”
Ok, now I like them a lot better. Will see what she says about some of those other comments above.
More from the Provenance Team:
I wrote above:
“But Provenance promises to track processes with their resource inputs and outputs, as well as the history of a given resource. They want to attract large corporations. They want to track every economic event with barcode readers, RFID thingies, etc. They want each economic event to be digitally signed. So some agent (presumably a business) will digitally sign the log of a process and its inputs and outputs. And all of that will exist in the Ethereum blockchain.”
Their correction:
“We aren’t interested in attracting large corps per se – we mostly work with SMEs. We don’t want to track every economic event. We are a marketing tool for small authentic brands to prove the provenance of their products – we aren’t a supply chain management tool.”
Now I like them better yet.