4 ms·

> Yes but how do I know that you didn't swap the barcodes or you didn't fiddle with the GPS or the thermometer was working or a million other things? Game theo

> Yes but how do I know that you didn't swap the barcodes or you didn't fiddle with the GPS or the thermometer was working or a million other things? Game theory. Without DLT you make more money by doing these things. With DLT it just becomes the cream skimming problem, where you're just paying money to shuffle assets around but you're actually losing money because the total value of all the assets is still the same. E.g. if you replace Wagyu beef with flank steak, A) you can only do that once rather than infinite times, like you can currently, because each asset still needs to have been originated somewhere B) you now have to either sell Wagyu beef as flank steak or else sell it into an unregulated market as a potential lemon, where you'll take a huge price hit anyway. So it certainly doesn't eliminate all fraud, but it eliminates the vast majority of fraud by A) ensuring you can only commit fraud at most once per genuine item produced B) vastly reducing the profitability of any fraud you do commit. Keep in mind that once DLT is common place, what's a status symbol isn't going to be the watch itself or whatever, but rather it's going to be having your purchase of the watch recorded in the DLT. This means that even if you do defeat all the tamper proof mechanisms or whatever, the original item is going to be basically worthless. Whether it's going to eliminate 99% of fraud or only 97.5% of fraud or whatever in each industry is difficult to say, but regardless of the exact number it's going to be high enough that everything not on the DLT is going to be both considered a potential lemon and also carry substantial legal risk, and as such will priced accordingly.

ghaff 8y ago
The fact that a blockchain can’t always be guaranteed to always represent the ground truth about physical assets is certainly a limitation. But I agree with you. This isn’t about 100% guarantees. It’s about making fraud harder and more expensive, increasing visibility, and streamlining the whole process. I remain something of a skeptic but there’s certainly a lot of interest in and money for things like provenance and supply chain tracking. Just reducing fraud and otherwise cutting costs could be a big win.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  > Just reducing fraud and otherwise cutting costs could be a big win. I mean that alone is a several trillion dollar a year improvement that will continue on indefinitely, and that's only one of the many applications for blockchain. Consider that roughly 75% of American adults of working age are either unemployed or underemployed, and in most countries it's vastly worse than that. The reason most of them are unemployed or underemployed isn't (for the most part) that they're unable or unwilling to work or that they don't have valuable skills, but rather that double entry accounting doesn't enable a broad enough spectrum of economic relationships to capture the long tail of human talent. When I say this is going to be a multi-quadrillion dollar technology I'm not kidding around. 99% of the stuff you own today wouldn't have been possible without the invention of double entry accounting, which vastly expanded the types of economic relationships that were possible and thereby vastly expanded the types of goods and services that could be produced. DLT isn't a replacement for your MySQL instance, it's a replacement for double entry accounting, and a 10x improvement at that. When people look back 500 years from now they're going to see that the vast majority of the (then) modern world wouldn't have been possible without it. It's going to largely replace the middle class in the same way that automation has largely replaced the working class, because if you go down the Bureau of Labor Statistics list of jobs it's pretty clear that most middle class American jobs are basically just fulfilling glorified accounting functions. Even just considering supply chain, as the profitability of creating counterfeit items decreases that doesn't just reduce the percentage of things you buy that are counterfeit, but it also makes it possible to make entirely new classes of (genuine) products that wouldn't have been economically viable previously.
  - spookthesunset 8y ago
    Mind telling the world what the hell “DLT” means? Dynamic link tracking? Database Local Transformation? And let’s be honest here, I’m gonna assume it is a clever buzzword designed to sell the failed blockchain technology to a new set of rubes, right?
    - Alex3917 8y ago
      Distributed ledger technology. This is the preferred industry term because there are many newer systems that offer or claim to offer the same guarantees as blockchains but that are implemented in different ways under the hood.
- tomrod 8y ago
  > It’s about making fraud harder and more expensive, increasing visibility, and streamlining the whole process It may cut fraud costs, but there are other ways to do that. Blockchain replicates computing costs relative to centralized data stores, so implementations have non-zero scaling costs.
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    > Blockchain replicates computing costs. Which is about as relevant as the cost of tea in china. Or, to steal another analogy, counting on database efficiency as the competitive advantage for your business is like picking up nickels in front of a steamroller. Especially since DLT efficiency will eventually be figured out. Even if it takes another five or ten years or even twenty years, that's nothing in the grand scheme of things.
    - spookthesunset 8y ago
      > Especially since DLT efficiency will eventually be figured out. Lol. The BlockChain is inefficient by design! It is that exact inefficiency that makes it trustless.
      - atq2119 8y ago
        Yes, it is. But to be fair to the DLT people, distributed ledgers could be useful without proof of work. They simply need a different, domain-specific consensus mechanism. Git is basically a distributed ledger without the proof of work inefficiency.
        tomrod 8y ago
        Right. But that's just distributed info, it's more or less a solved problem for many things (P2P, git, etc.). The proof of work is the "value add" of the enterprise, as it were, and there are certainly valuable use cases. But the implementation of distributed, cryptographically secure ledgers are not without tradeoffs--there is no free lunch.
InfinityLoop 8y ago
What does DLT stand for?
- tim333 8y ago
  Distributed ledger technology.

ghaff 8y ago

The fact that a blockchain can’t always be guaranteed to always represent the ground truth about physical assets is certainly a limitation. But I agree with you. This isn’t about 100% guarantees. It’s about making fraud harder and more expensive, increasing visibility, and streamlining the whole process. I remain something of a skeptic but there’s certainly a lot of interest in and money for things like provenance and supply chain tracking. Just reducing fraud and otherwise cutting costs could be a big win.

Alex3917 8y ago
> Just reducing fraud and otherwise cutting costs could be a big win. I mean that alone is a several trillion dollar a year improvement that will continue on indefinitely, and that's only one of the many applications for blockchain. Consider that roughly 75% of American adults of working age are either unemployed or underemployed, and in most countries it's vastly worse than that. The reason most of them are unemployed or underemployed isn't (for the most part) that they're unable or unwilling to work or that they don't have valuable skills, but rather that double entry accounting doesn't enable a broad enough spectrum of economic relationships to capture the long tail of human talent. When I say this is going to be a multi-quadrillion dollar technology I'm not kidding around. 99% of the stuff you own today wouldn't have been possible without the invention of double entry accounting, which vastly expanded the types of economic relationships that were possible and thereby vastly expanded the types of goods and services that could be produced. DLT isn't a replacement for your MySQL instance, it's a replacement for double entry accounting, and a 10x improvement at that. When people look back 500 years from now they're going to see that the vast majority of the (then) modern world wouldn't have been possible without it. It's going to largely replace the middle class in the same way that automation has largely replaced the working class, because if you go down the Bureau of Labor Statistics list of jobs it's pretty clear that most middle class American jobs are basically just fulfilling glorified accounting functions. Even just considering supply chain, as the profitability of creating counterfeit items decreases that doesn't just reduce the percentage of things you buy that are counterfeit, but it also makes it possible to make entirely new classes of (genuine) products that wouldn't have been economically viable previously.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  Mind telling the world what the hell “DLT” means? Dynamic link tracking? Database Local Transformation? And let’s be honest here, I’m gonna assume it is a clever buzzword designed to sell the failed blockchain technology to a new set of rubes, right?
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    Distributed ledger technology. This is the preferred industry term because there are many newer systems that offer or claim to offer the same guarantees as blockchains but that are implemented in different ways under the hood.
tomrod 8y ago
> It’s about making fraud harder and more expensive, increasing visibility, and streamlining the whole process It may cut fraud costs, but there are other ways to do that. Blockchain replicates computing costs relative to centralized data stores, so implementations have non-zero scaling costs.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  > Blockchain replicates computing costs. Which is about as relevant as the cost of tea in china. Or, to steal another analogy, counting on database efficiency as the competitive advantage for your business is like picking up nickels in front of a steamroller. Especially since DLT efficiency will eventually be figured out. Even if it takes another five or ten years or even twenty years, that's nothing in the grand scheme of things.
  - spookthesunset 8y ago
    > Especially since DLT efficiency will eventually be figured out. Lol. The BlockChain is inefficient by design! It is that exact inefficiency that makes it trustless.
    - atq2119 8y ago
      Yes, it is. But to be fair to the DLT people, distributed ledgers could be useful without proof of work. They simply need a different, domain-specific consensus mechanism. Git is basically a distributed ledger without the proof of work inefficiency.
      - tomrod 8y ago
        Right. But that's just distributed info, it's more or less a solved problem for many things (P2P, git, etc.). The proof of work is the "value add" of the enterprise, as it were, and there are certainly valuable use cases. But the implementation of distributed, cryptographically secure ledgers are not without tradeoffs--there is no free lunch.

InfinityLoop 8y ago

What does DLT stand for?

tim333 8y ago
Distributed ledger technology.