3 ms·

I asked this downthread, but to rephrase: are there any semi-objective case studies on blockchains being useful for physical items, such as the food supply trac

I asked this downthread, but to rephrase: are there any semi-objective case studies on blockchains being useful for physical items, such as the food supply tracking that IBM is doing? (I mean, I see plenty of blockchain startups promoting this use case, but they inevitably end up with a pitch to get on a blockchain.) I do not understand how, in the case of food supply, that a blockchain is somehow better than a good ol’ database. You can verify the ledger, but I don’t see how that’s the primary issue. It seems like the issue would be getting everyone up and down the supply chain to get on board with tracking everything, and not the integrity of the ledger. If a meat packing plant is going to adulterate the pork, the problem is going to be getting any verification at all, and not them hiring some hackers to mess with a database.

ashtonkem 6y ago
The issue with tracking physical things on the blockchain is that humans can lie to computers about the state of the physical world. Solving that with cryptography is attacking the wrong failing link; it’s actually a social issue and not a technical one.
- castlecrasher2 6y ago
  This right here. Whenever I see proponents of blockchain listing ways it could be used, every single one I read has second and third-order consequences they clearly haven't thought much about.
bena 6y ago
Exactly, Blockchain is only useful when you can't trust the store of information. Blockchain does not prevent people from just lying. Or people being lazy.
yenwel 6y ago
well you could validate data integrity based on - feedback from consumers of the commodity - some kind of built in monitoring with growth model benchmarking the different suppliers and instead of proof work do a decentralized/federated machine learning competition as a hard to falsify computation which uses private data for training and verification

ashtonkem 6y ago

The issue with tracking physical things on the blockchain is that humans can lie to computers about the state of the physical world. Solving that with cryptography is attacking the wrong failing link; it’s actually a social issue and not a technical one.

castlecrasher2 6y ago
This right here. Whenever I see proponents of blockchain listing ways it could be used, every single one I read has second and third-order consequences they clearly haven't thought much about.

bena 6y ago

Exactly, Blockchain is only useful when you can't trust the store of information. Blockchain does not prevent people from just lying. Or people being lazy.

yenwel 6y ago

well you could validate data integrity based on - feedback from consumers of the commodity - some kind of built in monitoring with growth model benchmarking the different suppliers and instead of proof work do a decentralized/federated machine learning competition as a hard to falsify computation which uses private data for training and verification