Indeed. And more to the point blockchain doesn't do a damm thing to improve trust. If someone in step three tosses the carrots out the window and uses a different batch the blockchain isn't going to get that information.
The blockchain in this example doesn't add or reduce trust at all it's just a time stamped database of stuff people said. We have those already.
Bingo. I still don’t follow how blockchain solves current problems. If the problem in your country is a lack of good record keeping, that’s not a technological problem. It’s a political problem. Cheap solutions have existed for centuries. The real question is why haven’t they been adopted? Why would those in power allow blockchain to be adopted but not existing technologies?
In most cases it seems that the existing technologies have been adopted and the people advocating for blockchain-based solutions just aren't aware that it's a solved problem.
I completely agree. It's naiveté. Technically, my local county recorder's office is a blockchain that has existed for centuries. It's cheap, reliable, correctable, enforceable, etc. It has all of the features without the downside.
People lying has always been a problem with grand internet visions. Remember the semantic web? It never went anywhere because people lie in metadata. There would have to be some sort of reputation system for participants, but with that comes an independent adjudication system to determine who is telling the truth. This brings back centralization.
I was talking with some people I know who work on HyperLedger, which is really lightweight blockchain stuff connected to the Linux foundation, and they say the most used blockchain is the one used for tracking where diamonds came from. I guess they are unique enough, or identifiable enough that they can't be easily replaced by diamonds that came from outside the system.
The blockchain solves the problem of trust. Without the blockchain, you need to trust some monopolistic middle-man that became monopolistic because he was the winner in the 'race of acquiring trust' from its consumers.
With a blockchain to track phisical goods, any third-party can consult or print a new transaction into the blockchain, it we wont need to deposit our faith in a company or a government.
We managed to solve the problem of trust, the best way we could, with the tools we had as a society, but if you analize all the paperwork, the bureocracy, the taxes and time taken to make the same system work in the classical way, there's a clear advantage in the new way od doing things.
How do I indelibly serialize my carrots? What stops me from eating the carrots I said I sent to the juice dude, and then just sending him some carrots I picked up from Loblaws?
In this particular case it doesnt solve this problem.
It solves the problem of the tracker.. Before you needed to trust the middleman by using another authority for trust, like your government given permissions and making inspections.
With the blockchain you can transfer that to the peers participating in the activities themselves.
It's the descentralization of trust. Right now we have to trust several databases from different peers, that no one have access to, and make a big effort if we need for instance know the state of something tracked by those systems.
Blockchain is a hype in a lot of situations, but that doesnt mean it doesnt have some problem domains it can be used to solve..
For me is just a algorithmic tool, like a hash, binary tree or a merkle tree. There are some problem domains where you might consider it as something to be used to solve some particular sort of problems.
Maybe for tracking physical goods it might not even be the best tool, according to the circustances, but it is something to be take into consideration, to solve this particular problem domain.
> With the blockchain you can transfer that to the peers participating in the activities themselves.
Assuming you can trust them, which kind of defeats the point. If you trust your supply chain, why do you need a computationally expensive trustless system?
