[Reelin]

> 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.

[notahacker]

Bearing in mind these documents all start off as paper, I'm not sure that really answers the question of what blockchain adds in the way of evidence of provenance over a scanner and upload facility...

Aircraft part sales aren't trustless, and for a good reason.

[dev_dull]

Likewise which one do you think they’ll trust if the blockchain disagrees with the paper trail? The paper trail of course, which makes putting this on blockchain worthless.

[rectang]

Naive question, since I'm not familiar with the aircraft parts marketplace: Can the elements of the paper trail be hashed and published publicly, and can then those hashes be factored into the blockchain?

[notahacker]

The irony is that what would actually make tangible improvements to aircraft part documentation would be more centralisation, since this allows a lot of cross validation of data on part ownership, maintenance intervals and hours/cycles data with other records regulators keep like data on flight paths and doesn't require sharing of commercially sensitive supply chain and operations information with people who don't need to know. And if you can't trust the regulator not to secretly falsify records, you've got bigger issues....

[root_axis]

Material objects cannot be hashed. It is physically impossible.

[rectang]

Yes, of course. But what makes the logical content of the documents/elements in the "paper trail" something that cannot be represented as text files or perhaps photographs?

[toast0]

In a word, trust. You can represent the information digitally, including via scanning, but you cannot digitally guarantee that the representation matches the paper copy; and the paper copy will likely hold in any disputes absent evidence of manipulation of the paper copy.

[ceejayoz]

That's just an argument for adding form validation to the websites, not for blockchain.

[Faaak]

How does that need a blockchain instead of a DB ?

[damnyou]

Distributed trust.

[ceejayoz]

> 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]

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]

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.

[dmitriid]

> Obviously a blockchain cannot magically make people do things they don't otherwise want to do.

So, what's the point, really, especially if talk about "Distributed trust" if blockchain provides nothing to ensure that trust?

> 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... a way that you don't have to trust any single entity

So, the details and provenance magically appear on the blockchain. Who verifies them? Who makes sure they are complete? Let me guess, some centralised/external entity?

So, there's some part associated with a token. What's to stop me from associating the same part with a different token? Or with 100 tokens? I'm guessing there is some centralised agency that verifies that a part is associated with a token through the part's serial number and that: a) no other token is associated with the same number and b) the seller associates serial numbers, and not some random numbers with the token?

I'm not even going into such things as "seller A sold part B to buyer C, received the money and never sent the part", let's start with documents, parts, tokens and associations.

[damnyou]

Yes, you need a trusted path to go from physical reality to the token on the blockchain. But blockchains let you shrink that path down to a small number of operations that can be closely scrutinized. (This is how blockchains are similar to cryptography, where the goal is to secure a large amount of data by keeping a small amount of data secret.)

As far as how to build that trust goes, what you're talking about is similar to the certificate signing problem. There are at least two ways to do this — a hierarchy trusted by everyone (akin to PKI) and a decentralized web of trust. Blockchains let you do either or both of those things since entities can sign off on the provenance on the blockchain. You can also have multiple entities sign off on it, similar to GPG keys.

[hn_throwaway_99]

My favorite line from this article is "blockchain is not internet of things": https://blog.smartdec.net/you-do-not-need-blockchain-eight-p...

[damnyou]

The article is correct that you still need oracles (of course you do), but wrong in saying that blockchains are therefore useless.

A better article would be more intellectually curious! For example, it might talk about the sorts of oracles blockchains could enable and how much of a burden they need to bear with and without blockchains.