Colnago to use blockchain tech on 2022 bikes

Yeah, put bike on workstand, stoop below, squint up at BB, try to discern frame number beneath the grime beneath the paint, now scratch your head to work out how to decide where to look it up. Discover you must have a digit wrong somewhere, rinse, repeat.

Or, scan RFID tag, get taken directly to manufacturer's database, confirm customer name. Maybe there's something in it.

If the bike you're looking at buying is so dirty its impossible to read the serial number, or the number has been scratched off, why would you be bothered about scanning its RFID. 
 

I don't know any shop that just randomly checks the bike a customer brought in is legally theirs, it's impossible to determine anyway as you don't update your eBay purchase with the manufacturer 

The OP's question related to bike shops checking bikes that come in for service, so your first paragraph is irrelevant. Your second paragraph just restates the problem that was being answered, so I'd just refer you back to my post.

Sriracha wrote:

scan RFID tag, get taken directly to manufacturer's database, confirm customer name. Maybe there's something in it.

The issue would be this is technology bike shops would have to buy into. You might get a few chain branches that will invest in it but your average bike shop is living off of tiny margains. No doubt the license and equipment to scan these things won't come without an off-putting price tag. 

Most mobile phones will scan an RFID tag.

Surely the difference is this; anybody can add, remove or replace an RFID sticker and substitute one that stores the own credentials, and claim that this proves their ownership. However with a blockchain database any edits and deletions are not possible, and additions will still leave the previous details intact. So the issue is how to tie the bike immutably to the blockchain database in the first place. I'd agree that an RFID sticker might not answer that - unless it is write-once and tamper evident (like a stamped frame number!)

Most any database can be set up to be immutable.  Blockchain is just where the hype is.

But essentially you are correct on the RFID.  Blockchain fails when it has to prove something in the physical world rather than as an electronic record like a cryptocurrency (and even then the holder of the wallet is king regardless of how they obtained it).  Its an identical problem to the cashing up process in a business.  The till might say you have taken £100 but your cashing up shows £98 because a £2 coin is missing - that prolly rolled under the fridge.  Its a ok audit trail - but thats all it is.

The nature of the updates also makes it fallible as it relies on a human doing it.  Who are the cops going to believe is the owner - these Lime guys whose record may not have been updated or a signed reciept or ebay auction record that can be tied back to the original owner?

The design goal of blockchain was to allow a group of UNTRUSTED parties to share a common ledger.

Note the important part there - untrusted; Bitcoin works on the basis of lots of people securing it such that noone needs to be trusted (whereas normal finance generally requires banks/governments as trusted parties). It also relies on no party having more processing power than was used to generate the chain (the bitcoin chain changes all the time - moores law is irrelevent because security increases in line with ability to break it - but for this it only gets reprocessed during a transaction, so it probably only takes a few years to render the existing security broken)

As far as I can see these tags will rely on a trusted central party. At which point blockchain is generally a bloody awful solution (as standard databases held by the trusted party use a fraction of the compute resources/data to achieve the same result)

(TLDR: lots of people are using blockchain because it is the *amazing new tech* for *problem* when traditional tech solutions are a better solution to *problem* in every way...)

Yes, there are basically three possibilities here

• It's a sensible design which doesn't use a blockchain at all, that's just marketing bullshit
• It's a largely sensible design polluted by just enough blockchain for the marketing bullshit to be technically not lying
• It's a stupid design, built around blockchain for marketing bullshit reasons

(Actually four, because it could be a design which sensibly doesn't use a blockchain but is broken for unrelated reasons.)

The thing blockchain loons fail to do every time is ask 'is there something that needs fixing?'

If they simply did that before proposing yet another crackpot solution to something that's working fine then blockchain and it's feral children, cryptocurrencies, would have died off years ago.

And don't get me started on NFTs, what a bunch of melts.

Ernesto sold it to venture capitalists. I don't blame him wanting to retire, but it will be run differently now. Would still have a C64 and a Master X-light if I could afford it though😍