Whisky, Glasgow and Blockchain … What Could Be Better?

Whisky, Glasgow and Blockchain … What Could Be Better?

Please excuse me, but I live in the most beautiful country on the planet, and world often knows Scotland best from its most famous export … whisky. But, in Scotland, we take innovation seriously, and it is the heartbeat of our cities. In terms of university spin-outs, Scotland has 20% of all the spin-outs in the UK, but only has 8% of the overall population. Everywhere you look there are university/industry partnerships, and new companies evolving with a focus on areas such as cybersecurity, machine learning and IoT.

My home city … Edinburgh … is cultured, educated and achingly beautiful, but it is also a city of data, and of finance, and of science. Glasgow, too, expands as quickly as it can, and has as many software developers in its city centre than most other places in the world.

On Thursday 28 March 2019 in Glasgow, the eyecademy and IBM will be showcasing how the whisky industry in Scotland could be transformed with the usage of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. An individual bottle — the nectar of the gods —could traced from its point-of-sale right back to its roots in the Highlands of Scotland, and where we could trace to provenance of the product from production to sale. New models of data sharing — in trusted ways — could be created, in order to share market analytics and identify risks within the supply chain. In an instance, we could know where every single of bottle of whisky was, and where it was selling most. We could predict peaks and troughs through anonymised machine learning on the blockchain, and make sure there was ethical disposal of waste products.

At the end, I’ll try and explain what a blockchain really is, and I might even show a Merkle tree, or two:

We are already nearly full, with lots of interested, but why not see the future of the food and drink industry by registering your interest in the event:

Scotland is now!