Dynamics 365 Business Central: Blockchain, Smart Contracts

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Blockchain, Smart Contracts

Hey everyone we're back at the whiteboards and we're going to keep talking about blockchain, I don't know if you heard but one of the blockchain networks the cryptocurrencies got hacked and basically the way that happened is that someone was able to change enough of the blockchain so that they proved worked algorithm when it went through it, thought that everything was okay because all of the chains had been changed before it managed to get through that. 

To show the blockchain in some sense is not 100% secure if it's implemented in the way that at least that cryptocurrency was, there are ways to make it more secure, but you need higher bandwidth for that you need a bigger entity and this Blockchain was actually run by a other small entity.  

In any case in this in these video series we're not really concerned about blockchain currencies or crypto currencies, what we're concerned about is the supply chain and the way blockchain effects this our supply chain. We're going to keep talking about that and and one of the big announcements with blockchain is that Walmart will require the suppliers of foods to send blocks or send information about the traceability of the food to IBM and IBM has a blockchain called a Food Trust, which is meant to track foods all the way through the chain from the grower, all the way to the retail store. 

Everybody in the supply chain who's dealing with Walmart now has to get up to speed on that and that's a big deal and we had at Inecta are already on that and communicating with IBM on setting that up so BC will be ready. 

Let's talk about blockchain from a supply chain standpoint, so again we have the blockchain here, so we got these links and let's say these are three blocks and they're connected together like we described in last video. Each one of these blocks has some information, in this case I'm just going to say that here we have a shipment of item, let's say its coffee beans and it's a 100 pounds at 10,000 dollars, so it's a sale it's a sales shipment from a company to a customer and it's now being shipped out. 

Let's say this is company A that sends it out right, and then the next block in the chain contains Company B and this is a receipt of the coffee beans and they receive a hundred pounds and they know it's going to cost $10,000. Let's say this happened, we sent yesterday today it was received right? so now we have a ledger in the blockchain, the company a reported that they ship the coffee beans hundred pounds and we can just for traceability purposes we can say that this was a lot ABC551 one and so the lot comes here a lot ABC551, so the lot keeps, you can then basically query the blockchain for the lot number you can see the all the ledger for that particular lot wherever it traveled even all the way to the farm. That's the idea behind the traceability. 

This is basically just the database logging the transactions right and so it's a centralized Authority that keeps the database and we're sending you there and we're accepting that centralized authority as a holder off all movement for this data great so why is this so important? what is so interesting about this? well there are more things you can do. 

Let's say for example, that this blockchain had smart contracts right and the smart one of the smart contracts in this was that, when there is a receipt then trigger payment. What you could set up basically, is that the blockchain is listening for a receipt of product and whenever there is a receipt of product it will automatically release payment back, and this is really interesting if you're talking about cryptocurrencies because that could actually happen with a blockchain as well using Bitcoin, but it could also happen with a bank transfer I don't see why that wouldn't be reasonable. 

Basically, when this happens, the next transaction here, which could happen automatically would be from Company B send payment of $10,000 and this happens automatically, so right away when they transfer the block: receive coffee beans to the to the blockchain, automatically payment is sent out to pay for that. Immediately so there's no system transaction that does that it's just all happening on the blockchain now that's of course revolutionary, especially for supply chain and again people have to trust this you know, the proof of work algorithm has to be great, which it wasn't for that other blockchain. 

So smart contracts will definitely change the way things operate in the supply chain if we ever get around to applying them everywhere,  one more thing I wanted to add to this we have smart contracts, in order to know that this happened there needs to be an Oracle that's monitoring this and it's called an Oracle, so we'll put that here Oracle. 

That is a facility that's watching the blockchain, it's observing the blockchain and executing the smart contract on the trigger, so the smart contract basically is looking at the Oracle and the Oracle is telling okay we have this happening this happened or basically it yeah it looks at that and then it triggers this, so if this happened then it triggers this and that gets created. It's important to have Oracle's in this scenario because if we only had the blockchain, the blockchain is technically just dumb storage of data which is very secure and distributed, but as far as the if you have smart contracts and an Oracle you will basically create a system. On that note maybe next time we go in screen share and go actually into Azure, do a blockchain creatable News business central without watching hopefully next week keep watching.