12 ms·

While this a great service for the aircraft parts industry, I am not seeing why this couldn’t be done with a database and a properly secured REST API.

seibelj 7y ago
Reduces risk of fraud or information getting corrupted accidentally, as changing one bit of data would corrupt the blockchain. I’m not saying you couldn’t do it without blockchain, but there is an argument about why that property is inherently useful in this market.
- TheMagicHorsey 7y ago
  Do you think banks and other users of databases don't think about fraud and corruption? What do you think we have been doing in database research for the last 50 years? Do you know why a blockchain is useful? Its to enable fraud and corruption detection in a decentralized way. If you are centralized, blockchain is a stupid way to achieve these goals. I expect more from the WSJ. I expect more from Silicon Valley than this kind of shameless hype.
  - seibelj 7y ago
    Core banking technology is from the 70s and hundreds of billions have been invested to keep it running, and upgrading the base later is essentially impossible. This is why everything in banking is super slow and fraud is still rampant. If you seriously think the banking system is the pinnacle of computer science you have rocks in your head.
    - walterstucco 7y ago
      He's right though: Blockchain is (maybe) useful in a decentralised system between untrusted actors Banking (and spare parts market) are the exact opposite: centralised systems between trusted actors A bank would never accept a transaction from an unknown source, just like you wouldn't buy replacement parts for airplanes from someone you don't already know
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      I don't want the banking system to be the pinnacle of computer science. As with space probes, aircraft, nuclear power plants, etc., running on old tech that's had a lot of the quirks shaken out already is a plus. Side note: Saying "fraud is rampant" as an argument for blockchain solutions is pretty funny.
      - seibelj 7y ago
        It would be impossible for someone to steal cryptocurrency held in your own wallet, whereas bank accounts are routinely compromised and looted. If not blockchain, certainly there is room for improvement in our current system? Saying you like our current system despite its high fees, slowness, and numerous deficiencies and don’t want it improved is essentially saying you want progress to halt.
        jacques_chester 7y ago
        > whereas bank accounts are routinely compromised and looted Which are also regularly reverted without fuss, regardless of whether you can work out who the attacker was. Banking is more than a ledger system. It's a ledger system and a massive web of institutional protections behind the ledger. By the time blockchain evolves the same norms, institutions, legal precedents, regulatory oversight and so on and so forth it just be a much-slower-than-a-real-database linked list.
        ceejayoz 7y ago
        > It would be impossible for someone to steal cryptocurrency held in your own wallet That's a bizarre assertion. Both individuals and entire exchanges find their cryptocurrency wallets regularly compromised. > whereas bank accounts are routinely compromised and looted For which there are both legal and practical protections in place. If your card is compromised, your liability is strictly limited, and it's typically a fairly easy process to recover from. > Saying you like our current system despite its high fees, slowness, and numerous deficiencies and don’t want it improved is essentially saying you want progress to halt. This is the "We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do it." fallacy. Banking can be improved evolutionarily without throwing out the whole system in favor of a fraud-ridden platform with scaling issues. It's already happening - transfers between banks in Europe are now near real-time via TIPS, for example. None of these improvements require blockchain, or even bleeding edge computer science of any kind.
    - jacques_chester 7y ago
      > This is why everything in banking is super slow and fraud is still rampant. This depends very much on jurisdiction. The USA has slow banking and high fraud because of the clearance system and because of weak identification of account-holders. In Australia, the UK, Europe and elsewhere, clearance systems are either faster (same-day), or allow direct bank-to-bank clearance, or both. Australia has strict banking identity laws, making it very difficult to open fraudulent accounts.
    - wtmt 7y ago
      Not sure what you mean by “everything in banking is super slow”. Maybe things are slow where you live. For money transfer (which is one part of banking), India has (had, for several years,) a few systems where money from any bank to any other bank in the country can be transferred in a matter of a few seconds or a few minutes depending on the transfer platform that the end user uses. There are no intermediaries in such transactions, like PayPal or something else. Nor are there any electronic systems that take a few days for transfer during working days.
Reelin 7y ago
> The encrypted digital trail cuts the need for paperwork and makes it quick and easy to check the certification and origin of a part ... > Many websites list used aircraft parts but omit details like final prices or provenance documents.
- Faaak 7y ago
  How does that need a blockchain instead of a DB ?
  - damnyou 7y ago
    Distributed trust.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      > Honeywell Aerospace charges companies $15,000 to establish a storefront on the marketplace. Buyers don’t need to pay a fee. > The company moved the blockchain to an internal cloud to be able to control security and data privacy, Mr. Muthukrishnan said. Not so distributed.
    - dmitriid 7y ago
      So. I, person A, am putting a part up for sail with "omitted details like final prices or provenance documents." How does blockchain solve this problem? I, person B, am buying that part. Then I'm putting it up for sale again with a different set of details and provenance documents (because I'm a fraud or because I don't have any other documents). How does blockchain solve this problem?
      - damnyou 7y ago
        Obviously a blockchain cannot magically make people do things they don't otherwise want to do. But what a blockchain can do is model parts as tokens that can only exist once on the chain, associate data like provenance documents with each token, then model sales as transfers of the token. Finally, it can do all that in a way that you don't have to trust any single entity (though you might have to trust the consensus of a large number of entities; this is better because pressuring many entities to lie is much harder than pressuring one to lie). Whether this particular blockchain uses that design is a separate question. I agree that if your trust model isn't distributed, a simple database will usually be better.
fenwick67 7y ago
It's just like the IBM Food Trust and a million other big corporate digitization projects - it's just marketing. It is likely not a blockchain but just a web application with a ledger database behind the curtain.
- OscarTheGrinch 7y ago
  Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Also applies to most corporate "AI".
cwilkes 7y ago
What can’t be done without a database and a rest api? That comment can be applied to anything.
- new4thaccount 7y ago
  The comment is likely pointing out that the blockchain portion of this project is just for marketing and doesn't add much if anything to just having a database that people can pull from. I'm not sure if that is entirely true though. The blockchain piece might provide the needed infrastructure, while providing needed authentication. I'm not really sure though to be honest. Maybe someone with more insight can point out whether the blockchain piece is really needed and helpful or just bloat.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  A decentralised currency. Where market participants can agree on a trusted intermediary for bookkeeping, blockchain really doesn't have much to offer.
- jkirsteins 7y ago
  Ask yourself, “where does the data originate?” If the data originates offline - e.g. paperwork for an aircraft part - you still need to trust whoever puts the data on the blockchain. Are they who they say they are? Are the documents trustworthy? The blockchain ensures tracability after data is on the blockchain, but not that the initial data makes sense. So if you need to verify these aspects manually at some point, might as well have everybody work through a regular API. However, in case of a digital currency - e.g. bitcoin - everything is generated on-chain. There is no crossing the offline/blockchain boundary. You can verify that data was generated according to the algorithm, and how it was used afterwards. This is where a blockchain is not necessarily replacable with a simple REST API.
  - cuchoi 7y ago
    I don't really understand how this works, but could it happen that another way of verifying is by multiple people submitting the same information? For example, the buyer and the seller of a part recording the transaction.
gok 7y ago
This is like arguing that TLS is stupid because you could just use a properly secure fiber cable.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  From the article: > Before blockchain, a transaction took, on average, two phone calls and four emails to arrange, and two days to close. The sale of larger parts such as engines could take weeks of sending quotes and exchanging documentation. With blockchain, a buyer can locate a part and purchase it immediately. I still see no reason that can't be solved with a website and a database, and I'd be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that's 90% of what it's actually doing, with perhaps some sort of blockchain tacked on to the side so it can get a good marketing story.
ris 7y ago
When it comes to the whole "supply chain blockchain" thing, I agree it is easy to just think "so, you just mean a signed log?", but there is actually an aspect to the whole thing that makes actual blockchains relevant here - and that's because they're both trying to solve the "double spending" problem. In this case the thing that a middleman might be trying to "double spend" is a part with a legitimate provenance. A simple record system might show that a middleman received part A from a legitimate source, but not immediately highlight that they sold on parts B and C too, each claiming to be part A. Blockchains solve that problem in a nice way with decentralized trust. Now, to what extent decentralized trust is relevant in a system apparently operated by Honeywell in a way that seems completely centralized... you know as much as me.
arisAlexis 7y ago
in every article with title "company X uses blockchain for Y" the top comment is someone saying "I don't see why". Do you have any idea about how the particular company schemantics work? How parts are sourced in this industry? What certification issues are? basically blockchain is about trust. So you know better than the company management and deem that their CTO made the wrong decision with zero information.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  You don't need to know all the details, because time and time again I have seen blockchain hyped up by people who don't fully understand it (or who are selling it) and the following runs it's course: 1. People get excited about blockchain because it's the "it thing" and people have some vague notion that it can apply to a distributed trust problem. 2. In nearly all cases, blockchain is a poor solution for the actual business need. This article, https://blog.smartdec.net/you-do-not-need-blockchain-eight-popular-use-cases-and-why-they-do-not-work-f2ecc6cc2129 https://blog.smartdec.net/you-do-not-need-blockchain-eight-p... , which was discussed at length on HN a couple months ago, has a detailed section on why blockchain is a bad fit for "object authenticity guarantee". 3. So then what happens is people usually basically end up solving their use case with a kind of "franken-private blockchain" that more often than not is just a cryptographically signed ledger DB. So yeah, I don't really care if the CTO is Jesus, as far as everything described in the article (which basically just describes a used-goods marketplace, gosh I've never heard of those before), blockchain is a "marketing-speak" solution.
  - arisAlexis 7y ago
    Here is why EY believe in blockchain so much. Maybe it will change your view a bit: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/say-hello-nightfall-paul-brody-1f/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/say-hello-nightfall-paul-brod...

seibelj 7y ago

Reduces risk of fraud or information getting corrupted accidentally, as changing one bit of data would corrupt the blockchain. I’m not saying you couldn’t do it without blockchain, but there is an argument about why that property is inherently useful in this market.

TheMagicHorsey 7y ago
Do you think banks and other users of databases don't think about fraud and corruption? What do you think we have been doing in database research for the last 50 years? Do you know why a blockchain is useful? Its to enable fraud and corruption detection in a decentralized way. If you are centralized, blockchain is a stupid way to achieve these goals. I expect more from the WSJ. I expect more from Silicon Valley than this kind of shameless hype.
- seibelj 7y ago
  Core banking technology is from the 70s and hundreds of billions have been invested to keep it running, and upgrading the base later is essentially impossible. This is why everything in banking is super slow and fraud is still rampant. If you seriously think the banking system is the pinnacle of computer science you have rocks in your head.
  - walterstucco 7y ago
    He's right though: Blockchain is (maybe) useful in a decentralised system between untrusted actors Banking (and spare parts market) are the exact opposite: centralised systems between trusted actors A bank would never accept a transaction from an unknown source, just like you wouldn't buy replacement parts for airplanes from someone you don't already know
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    I don't want the banking system to be the pinnacle of computer science. As with space probes, aircraft, nuclear power plants, etc., running on old tech that's had a lot of the quirks shaken out already is a plus. Side note: Saying "fraud is rampant" as an argument for blockchain solutions is pretty funny.
    - seibelj 7y ago
      It would be impossible for someone to steal cryptocurrency held in your own wallet, whereas bank accounts are routinely compromised and looted. If not blockchain, certainly there is room for improvement in our current system? Saying you like our current system despite its high fees, slowness, and numerous deficiencies and don’t want it improved is essentially saying you want progress to halt.
      - jacques_chester 7y ago
        > whereas bank accounts are routinely compromised and looted Which are also regularly reverted without fuss, regardless of whether you can work out who the attacker was. Banking is more than a ledger system. It's a ledger system and a massive web of institutional protections behind the ledger. By the time blockchain evolves the same norms, institutions, legal precedents, regulatory oversight and so on and so forth it just be a much-slower-than-a-real-database linked list.
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        > It would be impossible for someone to steal cryptocurrency held in your own wallet That's a bizarre assertion. Both individuals and entire exchanges find their cryptocurrency wallets regularly compromised. > whereas bank accounts are routinely compromised and looted For which there are both legal and practical protections in place. If your card is compromised, your liability is strictly limited, and it's typically a fairly easy process to recover from. > Saying you like our current system despite its high fees, slowness, and numerous deficiencies and don’t want it improved is essentially saying you want progress to halt. This is the "We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do it." fallacy. Banking can be improved evolutionarily without throwing out the whole system in favor of a fraud-ridden platform with scaling issues. It's already happening - transfers between banks in Europe are now near real-time via TIPS, for example. None of these improvements require blockchain, or even bleeding edge computer science of any kind.
  - jacques_chester 7y ago
    > This is why everything in banking is super slow and fraud is still rampant. This depends very much on jurisdiction. The USA has slow banking and high fraud because of the clearance system and because of weak identification of account-holders. In Australia, the UK, Europe and elsewhere, clearance systems are either faster (same-day), or allow direct bank-to-bank clearance, or both. Australia has strict banking identity laws, making it very difficult to open fraudulent accounts.
  - wtmt 7y ago
    Not sure what you mean by “everything in banking is super slow”. Maybe things are slow where you live. For money transfer (which is one part of banking), India has (had, for several years,) a few systems where money from any bank to any other bank in the country can be transferred in a matter of a few seconds or a few minutes depending on the transfer platform that the end user uses. There are no intermediaries in such transactions, like PayPal or something else. Nor are there any electronic systems that take a few days for transfer during working days.

Reelin 7y ago

> The encrypted digital trail cuts the need for paperwork and makes it quick and easy to check the certification and origin of a part ... > Many websites list used aircraft parts but omit details like final prices or provenance documents.

Faaak 7y ago
How does that need a blockchain instead of a DB ?
- damnyou 7y ago
  Distributed trust.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    > Honeywell Aerospace charges companies $15,000 to establish a storefront on the marketplace. Buyers don’t need to pay a fee. > The company moved the blockchain to an internal cloud to be able to control security and data privacy, Mr. Muthukrishnan said. Not so distributed.
  - dmitriid 7y ago
    So. I, person A, am putting a part up for sail with "omitted details like final prices or provenance documents." How does blockchain solve this problem? I, person B, am buying that part. Then I'm putting it up for sale again with a different set of details and provenance documents (because I'm a fraud or because I don't have any other documents). How does blockchain solve this problem?
    - damnyou 7y ago
      Obviously a blockchain cannot magically make people do things they don't otherwise want to do. But what a blockchain can do is model parts as tokens that can only exist once on the chain, associate data like provenance documents with each token, then model sales as transfers of the token. Finally, it can do all that in a way that you don't have to trust any single entity (though you might have to trust the consensus of a large number of entities; this is better because pressuring many entities to lie is much harder than pressuring one to lie). Whether this particular blockchain uses that design is a separate question. I agree that if your trust model isn't distributed, a simple database will usually be better.

fenwick67 7y ago

It's just like the IBM Food Trust and a million other big corporate digitization projects - it's just marketing. It is likely not a blockchain but just a web application with a ledger database behind the curtain.

OscarTheGrinch 7y ago
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Also applies to most corporate "AI".

cwilkes 7y ago

What can’t be done without a database and a rest api? That comment can be applied to anything.

new4thaccount 7y ago
The comment is likely pointing out that the blockchain portion of this project is just for marketing and doesn't add much if anything to just having a database that people can pull from. I'm not sure if that is entirely true though. The blockchain piece might provide the needed infrastructure, while providing needed authentication. I'm not really sure though to be honest. Maybe someone with more insight can point out whether the blockchain piece is really needed and helpful or just bloat.
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
A decentralised currency. Where market participants can agree on a trusted intermediary for bookkeeping, blockchain really doesn't have much to offer.
jkirsteins 7y ago
Ask yourself, “where does the data originate?” If the data originates offline - e.g. paperwork for an aircraft part - you still need to trust whoever puts the data on the blockchain. Are they who they say they are? Are the documents trustworthy? The blockchain ensures tracability after data is on the blockchain, but not that the initial data makes sense. So if you need to verify these aspects manually at some point, might as well have everybody work through a regular API. However, in case of a digital currency - e.g. bitcoin - everything is generated on-chain. There is no crossing the offline/blockchain boundary. You can verify that data was generated according to the algorithm, and how it was used afterwards. This is where a blockchain is not necessarily replacable with a simple REST API.
- cuchoi 7y ago
  I don't really understand how this works, but could it happen that another way of verifying is by multiple people submitting the same information? For example, the buyer and the seller of a part recording the transaction.

gok 7y ago

This is like arguing that TLS is stupid because you could just use a properly secure fiber cable.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
From the article: > Before blockchain, a transaction took, on average, two phone calls and four emails to arrange, and two days to close. The sale of larger parts such as engines could take weeks of sending quotes and exchanging documentation. With blockchain, a buyer can locate a part and purchase it immediately. I still see no reason that can't be solved with a website and a database, and I'd be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that's 90% of what it's actually doing, with perhaps some sort of blockchain tacked on to the side so it can get a good marketing story.

ris 7y ago

When it comes to the whole "supply chain blockchain" thing, I agree it is easy to just think "so, you just mean a signed log?", but there is actually an aspect to the whole thing that makes actual blockchains relevant here - and that's because they're both trying to solve the "double spending" problem. In this case the thing that a middleman might be trying to "double spend" is a part with a legitimate provenance. A simple record system might show that a middleman received part A from a legitimate source, but not immediately highlight that they sold on parts B and C too, each claiming to be part A. Blockchains solve that problem in a nice way with decentralized trust. Now, to what extent decentralized trust is relevant in a system apparently operated by Honeywell in a way that seems completely centralized... you know as much as me.

arisAlexis 7y ago

in every article with title "company X uses blockchain for Y" the top comment is someone saying "I don't see why". Do you have any idea about how the particular company schemantics work? How parts are sourced in this industry? What certification issues are? basically blockchain is about trust. So you know better than the company management and deem that their CTO made the wrong decision with zero information.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
You don't need to know all the details, because time and time again I have seen blockchain hyped up by people who don't fully understand it (or who are selling it) and the following runs it's course: 1. People get excited about blockchain because it's the "it thing" and people have some vague notion that it can apply to a distributed trust problem. 2. In nearly all cases, blockchain is a poor solution for the actual business need. This article, https://blog.smartdec.net/you-do-not-need-blockchain-eight-popular-use-cases-and-why-they-do-not-work-f2ecc6cc2129 https://blog.smartdec.net/you-do-not-need-blockchain-eight-p... , which was discussed at length on HN a couple months ago, has a detailed section on why blockchain is a bad fit for "object authenticity guarantee". 3. So then what happens is people usually basically end up solving their use case with a kind of "franken-private blockchain" that more often than not is just a cryptographically signed ledger DB. So yeah, I don't really care if the CTO is Jesus, as far as everything described in the article (which basically just describes a used-goods marketplace, gosh I've never heard of those before), blockchain is a "marketing-speak" solution.
- arisAlexis 7y ago
  Here is why EY believe in blockchain so much. Maybe it will change your view a bit: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/say-hello-nightfall-paul-brody-1f/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/say-hello-nightfall-paul-brod...