Hyperledger can offer a chain of authenticated data ownership transfers, and has several use-cases outside the classical database approaches.
It does however solve key logistics issues with distributed inventory ownership transfer involving 3rd parties. For example, Walmart has successfully deployed a blockchain system, and reported good performance of the technology under high-volume stress.
This is one of those edge cases most will never encounter unless they are handling millions of transactions an hour. It's a good problem to have though... =)
Walmart is one of the world's most sophisticated supply chain management companies. They use a private blockchain network to automatically reconcile invoices and payments. There are entire companies that make REALLY good money today that basically reconcile invoices for trucking fleets. Their blockchain technology does all that work for free, and as a result, they spend far less human hours chasing down data to ensure that the invoices are correct. It creates the paper trail for you automatically.
Okay, but what does the blockchain do exactly? You can have all that with traditional databases and asymmetric signatures.
My suspicion is that all these benefits were just from traditional process improvements, but the suits only approved the expense once someone slapped "blockchain" on the Powerpoint slide to sufficiently bamboozle them.
They've been developing this technology since 2010. Nobody outside of academia even knew what a blockchain was at the time. The blockchain gives them an easy way to create an immutable sequence of invoice and shipping data that reduced the overhead for freight companies by 20% and reduced their manual reconciliation burden from 70% to less than 1%.
My SO used to work in factoring. She and others would spend every day reconciling invoices and shipping information in order to allow the company she worked for to supply freight haulers with short term business loans. Not only would a lack of reconciliation result in not getting paid immediately, but if enough of these pile up (see the 70% number for manual reconciliations), then you're not going to be able to get a factoring loan either and you're dead in the water until something happens. Because it worked so well, everyone jumped on board almost immediately. Freight carriers are spending 20% less to haul the same goods, and Walmart is spending less trying to reconcile invoices.
Could they have used something else? I guess. But blockchains are pretty much just immutable lists of receipts anyway. They're perfect for the use case.
> Okay, but what does the blockchain do exactly? You can have all that with traditional databases and asymmetric signatures.
I know nothing about this, but my guess is that the "blockchain" Walmart uses is more or less that: a distributed database (not everyone online all the time) with some signatures and eventual consistency.
Working professionally with VMI / 3rd party inventories, I don't see how Blockchain would solve anything that isn't solved already. Maybe a well implemented blockchain solution is solving it easier, that's it so.
The main problem with third party inventories is always the question is the reported inventory levels and movements are actually correct. The real world answer to that is counting, together with the third party if so desired. Blockchain doesn't help with that since in itself it cannot guarantee that the physical movements and the dogital information flow are always in sync.
It does however solve key logistics issues with distributed inventory ownership transfer involving 3rd parties. For example, Walmart has successfully deployed a blockchain system, and reported good performance of the technology under high-volume stress.
This is one of those edge cases most will never encounter unless they are handling millions of transactions an hour. It's a good problem to have though... =)