How the Woolworths debacle could have been different with blockchain technology
Supermarket giant Woolworths on Monday 16th of April experienced a technical glitch that forced a nationwide system outage, causing thousands of shoppers to be left high and dry. This issue affected registers across the country, with around 500 stores closing for around an hour.
In the case of this outage, there have been no details released as to what the glitch was officially. I want to demonstrate an example of what it could have been and a way that the blockchain technology could help fix it.
Blockchain is the idea that you can record all transactions in a network over a set period of time onto an immutable document, a document that cannot be deleted or have its contents erased. This document is then encrypted and linked to the previous document of transactions. These documents are shared with everyone on the network and because they are encrypted all you can do is compare ID numbers. Like a product in a supermarket has unique ID number, these transactions that are being made also have a unique ID and this is what is on these documents and shared with everyone. The documents are shared to remove the need for some middle person to do this, reducing fees and removing the need to trust other people to do this for you.
Let’s say that this is a server issue. The file that was required, that had a certain coded function was not able to accessed, throwing the entire network into chaos. This could have been due to a number of things, for example, the file corrupted, was moved to a different spot, a power outage at the data centre, the server in the data centre had a fault. Anyone of these and many more are reasons for a technical glitch like the one we saw yesterday. A blockchain solution would help to stop these from happening. The blockchain is decentralised, distributed and immutable, all key characteristics that solve the previously stated problems.
Because the details of the files are not on a single server, it is stored on every node in the network. Every register stores the same information, if something goes wrong with the software in one register, one of the other registers would be able to update it to what is seen as the agreed file. The blockchain works off consensus so whatever is voted as the current system is what is used by the network. This all means that if the file corrupted or there was a server issue it would not affect anyone.
Blockchain technology had the ability to also fix a previous problem when they had a large data leak in 2015. An email that should have contained customers eGift cards were treated to a spreadsheet that contained nearly 8000 eGift card redemption codes, worth over $1.3 million. A blockchain would have allow them to build something called a smart contract. Basically, it is a contract that has the terms and clauses turned into actionable computer code that is then enforced and executed by the network. The blockchain keeps track of these contracts, again meaning there is no need for a third party to regulate them. But how does this help Woolworths? Easy, instead of Woolworths taking your information and putting into a spreadsheet, then creating a PDF that anyone can read and understand. A smart contract creates a contract that the computer can enforce and in the case of an eGift card, means you can create this contract for a specific person that only that person can access and use.

A smart contracting system could be used instead of this current system. The smart contracting system would need to take in the information from the person, ID of the person (their digital address), what the person is purchasing, the time of purchase for authentication, price of purchase, time limit and any terms or conditions that are attached. Because your address is added to the contract, it specifies that only you can access it. Only you would be able to access it because the contracts instructions state to only allow this certain person with their private key to view and use the product. This not only has applications in eGift cards but millions of other digital products.
