Blood diamonds, stolen cars, sweatshops: Blockchain stops all that | Brian Behlendorf | Big Think

Blood diamonds, stolen cars, sweatshops: Blockchain stops all that

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Blockchain technology, as a digital ledger for economic transactions, is poised to "radically" impact companies across the board.

It may help reinforce the trust in certain markets as sensors collect data throughout production.

Blockchain might also create a marketplace for whistleblowing.

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BRIAN BEHLENDORF:

Brian Behlendorf is a technologist, computer programmer and leading figure in the open-source software movement. He was a founding member and primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet. In 2016, he was appointed executive director of the open source Hyperledger project at the Linux Foundation to advance blockchain technology. To find out more, go to hyperledger.org.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Brian Behlendorf: Ginni Rometty, who's the CEO of IBM, said she believed that blockchain technology will be to transactions what the Internet was to information, meaning it will be pervasive across all industries that touch transactions — which is all of them. They all deal with money, they all deal with tracking product and the handoffs of value from one party to another. So unless you're in a business that does nothing of value, at some point blockchain technology will touch what you're doing. And for some businesses it will radically transform who they are and what they do.

So one of the most intriguing use cases that really caught my attention when I first started to dive into this technology landscape was the use of distributed ledgers for supply chain provenance. Partly as a way to make that industry more efficient, more collaborative, more transparent, but also as a way to try to fight or track where objects came from and make sure they came from the right places, and a great example of this is the diamond industry. The diamond industry starting about 20 years ago has had a real serious political top-down commitment to prevent blood diamonds from entering circulation, blood diamonds being diamonds that came from mines that involve slave labor, that perhaps were used as payment for illicit products and services — like these are diamonds that had unclear provenance, and the whole goal was to enable somebody buying a diamond at the retail channel to know all the way back to the mine that it came from and that between points A and B it was in good hands.

Right now when you try to buy a diamond and see that provenance you maybe get a certificate with a bunch of stamps on it, but what does that mean to you? What does that mean to anybody? So the diamond industry has realized that they need to transform that process into something that is more of a distributed ledger, in fact is an implementation of a distributed ledger, as a way to allow all the parties involved in the diamond process to record a transaction every time that they transfer diamonds from the mine to the refinery to like the place where it's worked on to the distributer out to the retail channel, each of those parties would be a participant on that ledger, and when they handed diamonds off or they received a package of diamonds would confirm and write transaction saying "I sent this/I received this" so that we have this unbreakable chain going all the way back to the mine of where these diamonds came from. And we can deal with parties who themselves might not have a long history, a deep history of involvement, but if they have these digital signatures, which would be really difficult if not impossible to forge, then they could participate and be a part of this process.

And we might eventually get to a model that looks somewhat like when you buy a car you register that car in a title system that if your car gets stolen you can go and say, "Well no, actually, I own that," or if somebody tried to steal your car and sell it to somebody else without your consent that's tracked by the title system. We'll probably get to a point where your ability to sell a diamond of certain expense or quality or higher is based on being able to show that your ownership is recorded in this ledger, which would do a tremendous amount to try to keep bad product from entering the market.

That I think would do a lot to help reinforce the trust in that market. And by the way, it might create a marketplace for whistleblowing.

Some factories, for example, that employ a lot of human labor, they try to ensure that the temperature inside these factories remain...

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