> Fighting imposter products may have extremely valuable applications for blockchain, for example knock-off Gucci bags This example always gets brought up but

> Fighting imposter products may have extremely valuable applications for blockchain, for example knock-off Gucci bags This example always gets brought up but Gucci bags already come with serial numbers and receipts that you can use for lookups and registration with Gucci. Presumably Gucci is using a database to store this information. What benefit would consumers realize if Gucci changed out their database for one that was immutable? Is there really any significant number of Gucci consumers who don’t trust the company to maintain the integrity of the product database they currently use? The interests of the company and their customers seem pretty aligned. Perhaps there would be some benefit to having the full sales database easily and instantly accessible by anyone in the world? But absent any demand from consumers for them to go farther than they already have that would seem to be outweighed by Gucci’s desire to not reveal all of their sales data to competitors (or GDPR-busting private information for that matter). If they did want to give up such detailed information then why not just provide weekly sql dumps on the web and avoid the consultant fees and expense of maintaining a more inefficient database? Perhaps they could also make customers sign a contract that prevents hem from engageing in private sales without registering the sale with GucciCentral. The fact they have never taken a simple steps like these to dispell any trust issues between them and their customers tells me that there may not be many that their current systems don’t already address adequately. Please tell me if I’m missing something. This one has puzzled me for years.