The anti-epidemic supplies company was fined for returning goods, this pot blockchain does not back!

Recently, the Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China issued a circular that decided to stop the export of anti-epidemic products of the two companies on the grounds that "the two companies were returned by foreign parties due to product quality problems, disrupting the order of export of anti-epidemic products and seriously affecting the national image."

Among them, there is a company that is connected to the "blockchain", and its name is Beijing Qidi Blockchain Technology Development Co., Ltd.

Said that the blockchain can be traced to anti-counterfeiting, is it lying to me?

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This article will tell you that it really has nothing to do with blockchain!

Let us explain step by step:

In fact, in the current context, traceability and anti-counterfeiting is indeed a slogan that has not yet been realized, and this stems from a long-standing problem in the field of computers and information and communication-" garbage in, garbage out " (abbreviation: GIGO) ^[1] , meaning that the wrong data is entered, the result must be wrong and meaningless.

In the field of blockchain, this is a very fatal problem, because the blockchain itself can only ensure that the data is difficult to tamper, and if the wrong data is entered, the "difficult to tamper" attribute is the credibility of the system. Very unfavorable, if there is continuous wrong data input, the system will eventually become a garbage database, and assuming that the "hard to tamper" attribute is removed, it means that the system has left the category of "blockchain".

According to the above logic, the blockchain seems to have a very contradictory relationship with the source anti-counterfeiting, rather than the solution.

Don't worry, let's see how the ancestors of the blockchain (bitcoin created by Satoshi Nakamoto) bypassed the problem of "garbage in, garbage out".

Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned in Bitcoin ’s white paper ^[2] that Bitcoin is a proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm that uses the “longest chain” rule, but in fact it uses the “heaviest chain” rule, meaning The chain with the "largest workload" will be considered as the main chain, and the chain with less workload resulting from its fork will be considered as the "forked chain" (representing Bitcoin Cash).

(Figure: Forked graph of BTC and BCH)

The main point here is that the workload is contributed by the computer (also known as the miner), which greatly reduces the degree of human participation, and then the data contributed by a large number of computers is determined by time stamps and consensus algorithms A consensus result, and use this as the standard, and the result of violating this standard will be regarded as pseudo-bitcoin.

That's it, Bitcoin bypasses the problem of "garbage in, garbage out", thus solving the problem of token data forgery, but we need to understand that Bitcoin's data itself comes from the chain, so it can be easier has been solved.

But if we want to upload the data under the chain to the chain, then at this time, the headache of "garbage in, garbage out" will appear again.

This is because we currently have no way to ensure that data from outside the chain is "unforgeable" or "true."

(Picture from: tucheng.com)

Here are two simple examples. The first example is a mask:

Because the price of melt-blown cloth for key materials keeps rising, mask manufacturer A uses ordinary cloth materials to ensure high profits, but the manufacturer's operators fill in the materials as melt-blown cloth when recording on the blockchain. After the masks are produced, they need to pass the logistics. Assuming that the logistics personnel are honest and credible, they enter their "real results" into the blockchain. Finally, after receiving the masks, the receiver passes the second The source code and raw materials of the mask are scanned by the QR code, and the blockchain concludes that the mask is anti-epidemic, but the fact is that the mask is a fake and shoddy product. In this example, we only assumed that the input data at the source is wrong Situation, but in the real scene, there may be situations where the input data is wrong in the middle link, and as long as one of the links is wrong, the information given by the blockchain will be wrong.

The second example is to post an article or statement on the blockchain:

Suppose that B was wronged by C, and then C wrote an article that painfully described the top ten crimes of B. In order for the article not to be deleted, C published this article through Ethereum or other public chains. In the end, the truth was clarified, but C's error article is still left in the blockchain database and cannot be changed.

The two examples above illustrate that the blockchain cannot solve the problem of "garbage input" from off-chain data.

Can we learn from Bitcoin's ideas, remove the factors of human participation, and use consensus algorithms to solve the authenticity of off-chain data?

This is where the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence come into play. Simply put, it is to complete the repetitive data collection process through machine equipment or higher-level robots. This process is to remove human participation factors, and then use algorithms to The data is processed to obtain a more reliable off-chain result.

Finally, upload these data to the blockchain to ensure that the data is difficult to be tampered with.

This complete combination of Internet of Things + AI + blockchain is the true anti-counterfeiting traceability solution. As long as one of the links is missing, the entire system is vulnerable (that is, untrustworthy).

But as far as the current development is concerned, every component in this combination needs to be improved.

Therefore, it is actually a very difficult thing for blockchain anti-counterfeiting projects to be truly implemented.

And a short-term alternative idea is to strengthen the evaluation and supervision of off-chain data governance. As mentioned in the article written by Yao Qian, you can consider setting up an alliance chain joint working group to evaluate the maturity of off-chain data governance of each node. Degree, urge all parties to improve the quality of data on the chain, and if necessary, set the entry threshold for data governance maturity ^[3] .

This idea is to replace machines and algorithms through human consensus, and is a short-term viable alternative solution.

So in the final analysis, the example mentioned at the beginning of this article is actually not a problem of blockchain, but a problem of people, it is a problem of this company.

Finally, thanks to Satoshi Nakamoto for providing us with a solution to the "garbage in, garbage out" problem.

1.Garbage in, garbage out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out ↵

2.Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf ↵

3. Yao Qian: Responding to Fintech with regulatory technology is the way to deal with blockchain governance https://www.8btc.com/article/546268 ↵

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