مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد استفاده از بلاک چین برای آنالیز قابلیت ردیابی مواد غذایی – الزویر ۲۰۱۸

The steady increase in food falsification, which has caused large economic losses and eroded consumers’ trust, has become a pressing issue for producers, researchers, governments, consumers and other stakeholders. Tracking and authenticating the food supply chain to understand provenance is critical with a view to identifying and addressing sources of contamination in the food supply chain worldwide. One way of solving traceability issues and ensuring transparency is by using blockchain technology to store data from chemical analysis in chronological order so that they are impossible to manipulate afterwards. This review examines the potential of blockchain technology for assuring traceability and authenticity in the food 38 supply chain. It can be considered a true innovation and relevant approach to assure the quality of the third step of the analytical processes: data acquisition and management.

Blockchain fundamentals

Blockchain technology emerged in 2008 as a core component of the bitcoin cryptocurrency (Bhardwaj and Kaushik, 2018). Blockchains provide transactional, distributed ledger functionality that can operate without the need for a centralized, trusted authority. Ledger recorded updates are immutable and cryptographic time stamping affords serial recording. The robust, decentralized functionality of blockchains is very attractive for use with global financial systems but can easily be expanded to contracts or operations such as tracking of the global supply chain. Three papers from the 1960s established specific principles that subsequently materialized in the blockchain concept. Thus, Haber and Stornetta (1991) described how to use crypto-signatures to time-stamp documents; Ross Anderson (1996) proposed a decentralized storage system from which recorded updates could not be deleted; and Schneier and Kelsey (1998) described how to encrypt sensitive information in order to protect log files on untrusted machines. 69 A blockchain is essentially a distributed database of records in the form of encrypted “blocks” (smaller datasets), or a public ledger of all transactions or digital events that have been executed and shared among participating parties, and can be verified at any time in the future. Each transaction in the public ledger is verified by consensus of a majority of participants in the system. Once entered, information can never be erased. The blockchain contains a certain, verifiable record of every single transaction ever made and its blocks can be used to coordinate an action or verify an event. This is accomplished without compromising the privacy of the digital assets or parties involved. In order to prevent third party sources such as banks, governs or social networks from being hacked, manipulated or compromised, this technology uses mathematical problems that require substantial computational power to solve (Nakomoto, 2009). This protective measure makes it harder for potential attackers to corrupt a shared database with false information unless the attacker owns most of the computational power of the overall network.