Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain
Since so many comments on this thread are so absolutely negative, I will try to play devil&#x27;s advocate here.<p>Is a given blockchain a more efficient database?  Not efficient measured by percent of data stored in any given entry, which of course throughput and any other, &quot;engineering metric,&quot; will suffer because of that.  As an engineer, the idea of wasted energy, memory, space, etc., makes one cringe.<p>Efficient from the standpoint of preventing loss of human life or preventing sickness?  Well, in the United States where likely most of us live, this is not as big of a problem, but likely in many other countries such as China, &quot;food authenticity,&quot; is a problem.  Let&#x27;s keep in mind that Walmart has more stores and customers in China and more problems with food than the United States by orders of magnitude.<p>If I&#x27;m an actor within the food system in China which presumably has multiple middle-men, and I want to move one product up the supply chain through multiple, ultimately ending up on the shelves at Walmart, then I will not want to give away my source, because I want to get preferential pricing.  However if I can convince my suppler upstream to use this tool (it doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s IBM, Google, Alibaba, or some startup or whatever, it&#x27;s just a tech tool), to track and register when food was, &quot;picked&quot; or &quot;harvested&quot; then I don&#x27;t have to give information to my buyer about the source, yet the database is all, &quot;standardized,&quot; in terms of labeling.  Keep in mind the alternative would be some kind of bar coding system which perhaps Walmart would have to impose.  Well, I don&#x27;t want my upstream partners knowing that this is going to Walmart either, otherwise they will jack up the pricing.  If everyone is using some IBM tool, and assuming the IBM tool sees increasing adoption, then no one (hopefully) knows where or who a particular food is going to, yet any problem foods can be tracked back to their source by the end seller, without having to impose multiple types of key-value pair, bar-coding database systems, which - while technically easier to implement and run more smoothly from an engineering standpoint, perhaps do not take the entire use case into mind, because parties within the supply chain may be unwilling to share their source or destination due to pricing incentives.<p>Mind you, I am no food systems expert, I am just trying to talk hypotheticals here.  I think the knee-jerk reaction on Hacker News within this thread is an almost Redditian &quot;reaping karma&quot; approach by putting down Blockchain, because many of us have had bad experiences working with corporate executives who have no idea how various types of technology work, and implementing non-technology buzzwords ends up being painful.  That being said Blockchain at its heart, stripping away the history, is just a mathematical concept, and it&#x27;s a math tool that can be used to point from one source to another.  Calling it a, &quot;mind disease,&quot; is losing sight of that.<p>Typically the types of discussions on hacker news that I enjoy reading are more angled toward how do you reverse engineer things, not just insulting an idea without backing up one&#x27;s insult.