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I can't see how this is a solution. The problem isn't whether corruption is possible, the problem is trust. It's a social problem, not a technical problem. You

I can't see how this is a solution. The problem isn't whether corruption is possible, the problem is trust. It's a social problem, not a technical problem. You can have the most corruption-free system in the world, but normal people won't understand how it works, nor will they care to verify the system. They get their trust through their social circle, e.g. "my mother and my friends say X is reliable while Y is untrustworthy". The more people that they trust they hear it from, repeatedly, the more they view X as reliable. The blockchain has no such reputation except possibly among certain techies, which is a tiny portion of the population. The blockchain may allow a group of experts to verify truth, but this only impacts the population at large if somehow the opinions of these experts propagate to the larger population. That step is a marketing and communication problem. For example Nutricia, the company behind the Dutch Nutrilon milk powder that Chinese are buying en masse, opened factories in China and sold Nutrilon directly in China. They've been doing this for several years now, yet demand for Nutrilon produced in the Netherlands remains high. Why? Because people don't trust that the Nutrilon produced in China is not a scam. Only after mass marketing campaigns, e.g. hiring celebrities as spokespeople, are people beginning to trust it.

njloof 9y ago
Celebrities > blockchains?
- charlesdm 9y ago
  No, but blockchains aren't the solution to everything. If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and this definitely seems to be something that lives in the crypto community. Blockchains: the solution to every problem that has ever existed and will ever exist has arrived.
mike_hearn 9y ago
Hey there FBW, long time no see :) I think you're mis-judging the intended userbase of an app like this. The word "blockchain" has unfortunately become more and more diluted over time as people explore use cases further and further away from technology. In some cases it ends up meaning little more than better living through technology. Most developed countries have supply chain tracking systems that let regulators and industry investigate supply chain problems. Mobile apps to let you find the story of your personal steak are a bit of a gimmick. It's better to think of these systems as debug logs, intended to let professionals isolate problems in the pipeline. These systems are of course only as good as the data that goes into them. They aren't silver bullets or whole solutions. But if you can get to a situation where most suppliers are honest, they can help guide investigations towards the suppliers that are dishonest. The UK horsemeat affair shows how investigators were able to track down the dishonest suppliers and, crucially, assemble enough evidence to do something about it. The simple and obvious way to implement supply chain tracking is a big central web app with database. But it leads to common problems: • Who builds this system? • Who pays for it to be run? • Can you trust the administrators? • If an administrator is corrupted, can you recover? The traditional answers are "the government via a small set of large public sector IT contractors", "industry via tax" or "industry via payments", "hopefully" and "no". You can also get private sector solutions, but these tend to struggle to get wide adoption because industries fear being held in hock to a monopoly. These outcomes are not ideal. They aren't standards based or open source, individual users can't really improve their experience of using the system, data is concentrated in a single place where it's ripe for hacking and manipulation, digital signatures are used rarely if at all, and in general it's just not ideal. Modern blockchain-inspired systems like Corda, which I work on, are actually quite different to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Data isn't broadcast everywhere, there's no mining, etc. If you want you can think of them as document management systems. You have versioned digitally signed data structures with a PKI to root signatures in real world identities, a P2P network for businesses and organisations to run complex workflows over and so on. These are useful for managing large, distributed data management operations, for managing the evolution of data across many different parties and so on. Ultimately, Chinese people will not learn to trust their food through an app. Instead China will develop the same sorts of largely invisible systems that create an ambient trust in the food system, and you won't need celebrities anymore. Software can play a part of that.
- FooBarWidget 9y ago
  Nice seeing you around! What you say makes a lot of sense.
- tingbadimalo 9y ago
  This is such a great response. Thinking of blockchains as a decentralized document management system for managing the evolution of data makes a lot of sense and really articulates the value proposition of Blockchain. Thank you for this response.

njloof 9y ago

Celebrities > blockchains?

charlesdm 9y ago
No, but blockchains aren't the solution to everything. If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and this definitely seems to be something that lives in the crypto community. Blockchains: the solution to every problem that has ever existed and will ever exist has arrived.

mike_hearn 9y ago

Hey there FBW, long time no see :) I think you're mis-judging the intended userbase of an app like this. The word "blockchain" has unfortunately become more and more diluted over time as people explore use cases further and further away from technology. In some cases it ends up meaning little more than better living through technology. Most developed countries have supply chain tracking systems that let regulators and industry investigate supply chain problems. Mobile apps to let you find the story of your personal steak are a bit of a gimmick. It's better to think of these systems as debug logs, intended to let professionals isolate problems in the pipeline. These systems are of course only as good as the data that goes into them. They aren't silver bullets or whole solutions. But if you can get to a situation where most suppliers are honest, they can help guide investigations towards the suppliers that are dishonest. The UK horsemeat affair shows how investigators were able to track down the dishonest suppliers and, crucially, assemble enough evidence to do something about it. The simple and obvious way to implement supply chain tracking is a big central web app with database. But it leads to common problems: • Who builds this system? • Who pays for it to be run? • Can you trust the administrators? • If an administrator is corrupted, can you recover? The traditional answers are "the government via a small set of large public sector IT contractors", "industry via tax" or "industry via payments", "hopefully" and "no". You can also get private sector solutions, but these tend to struggle to get wide adoption because industries fear being held in hock to a monopoly. These outcomes are not ideal. They aren't standards based or open source, individual users can't really improve their experience of using the system, data is concentrated in a single place where it's ripe for hacking and manipulation, digital signatures are used rarely if at all, and in general it's just not ideal. Modern blockchain-inspired systems like Corda, which I work on, are actually quite different to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Data isn't broadcast everywhere, there's no mining, etc. If you want you can think of them as document management systems. You have versioned digitally signed data structures with a PKI to root signatures in real world identities, a P2P network for businesses and organisations to run complex workflows over and so on. These are useful for managing large, distributed data management operations, for managing the evolution of data across many different parties and so on. Ultimately, Chinese people will not learn to trust their food through an app. Instead China will develop the same sorts of largely invisible systems that create an ambient trust in the food system, and you won't need celebrities anymore. Software can play a part of that.

FooBarWidget 9y ago
Nice seeing you around! What you say makes a lot of sense.
tingbadimalo 9y ago
This is such a great response. Thinking of blockchains as a decentralized document management system for managing the evolution of data makes a lot of sense and really articulates the value proposition of Blockchain. Thank you for this response.