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.
]]>Ok, now I like them a lot better. Will see what she says about some of those other comments above.
]]>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:
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.
]]>