#blockchainindentity

Low-quality or even fake olive oil has been a problem for quite a while—going back at least to the Romans. In extreme cases, the “olive oil” you’re buying isn’t even made from olives, but from nuts, seeds, or soybeans.

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And now, there’s a way to prove whether olive oil is real and high-enough quality for the “extra virgin” designation. To show its bona fides, Tunisian olive oil producer CHO has teamed up with IBM, using blockchain—an encrypted, decentralized database used to track transactions—to document key steps in a shipment’s lifetime. The technology will be able to verify the authenticity of extra virgin olive oil sold under CHO’s Terra Delyssa brand.

The digital ledger records eight key details about each shipment, such as the orchard where the olives were grown, the mill where they were crushed, and facilities where the oil was filtered. Because a blockchain database has multiple copies, held by different parties, any change to the record has to be agreed upon by everyone involved—which means a single party can’t manipulate the records and fool you into thinking you’re buying legit olive oil when you’re not. Starting with oil from the November crop, due in stores in March, customers will be able to access this information by scanning a QR code on each bottle with their smartphone. CHO says the oil will be available at retailers in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Denmark, and Japan.

The IBM Research project is notable because it suggests that the deterministic requirements of blockchains can be combined with the black box of AI, allowing machine learning algorithms to alter the shape of blockchains to adapt to power or latency limitations, without compromising security.

As such, this would seem to open the door to a whole new design space.

"Why not augment the blockchain with analytics and AI algorithms that can actually shape the blockchain in a way that it helps it to overcome some of the limitations that are out there now?" said Ragnoli.

In the case of IoT, the way this works is the AI receives as an input the IoT devices that are on the system and the available resources of those devices. It also assesses the overall security requirements of the system and decides which and how many devices are mining, the PoW difficulty, the block generation rate, the block size and tries to balance between required security and scalability.

In theory, it will soon be possible to store our personal data on the blockchain, using biometrics to grant access only to those who ask for permission to see it. This could mean a day will come when we no longer need to rely on credit agencies like Equifax to collect and store troves of our personal information. More ambitious visions of identity—backed by the likes of Accenture and Microsoft—envision using blockchain as a way to help refugees and the world’s poor obtain citizenship and immigration records. Best of all, the security features of blockchain could mean hacking and identity theft will become much harder.