Fastwong
1658
Agreed, the whole premise that blockchain or digital tech can validate physical goods fundamentally ignores how the real world works.
Sep 02, 2021,19:42 PM
I've explored blockchain and other traceability tech with luxury brands, big pharma, etc and it's full of holes for two fundamental reasons:
1. Digital validation does not easily translate to physical goods. Any physical unique identifier can be replicated, it's just a question of how much it costs.
2. Blockchain is primarily there for distributed validation of transactions, not authentication of a good. Traceability and Authentication are two entirely different things.
QR codes are easy for transacting and have zero authentication use, it's one level up from serial numbers and bar codes. NFC/RFID? Those chips cost pennies, if I have the (cheap) hardware to read them I can also burn copies all day long. You can have some obscure micro-dot embedded rf tech for sure but then costs go up and proprietary hardware is needed to authenticate it and now that I need proprietary hardware, having a public chain is pointless because the public can't publish to it. At that point you can just have an internal tracking system. This of course all ignores Patrick's point that that being a physical good, it's more easy than not for things to occur off chain because that's real life.
There are some interesting authentication technologies in the art world, micro-imaging and such, but again, that's authentication not traceability. Sorry for the rant, I've had too many meetings with luxury brands on this and it always drive me nuts. The one productive meeting I've had on this was with a c-level leader at an LVMH brand, he / she said "blockchain authentication for our X is not really a thing right?" to which I confirmed, then we moved on to other more important things. It's all a bridge to nowhere which is fine if they want to spin that to shareholders but I hate to see resources wasted at the expense of pragmatic simpler solutions.