Reading your comment made me think of an ad i saw several years ago.

It was an ad that started off like a typical quality coffee ad, nice pictures of beans, people harvesting, some roasting etc. But than it switched to the topic if making sure that "fair trade" was really applied - switching to IBM Blockchain and claiming that through the use of Blockchain there is safety that everything went fair trade.....

And i just thought.... sure... your blockchain approves that those workers harvesting got paid fair... or does it? All it actually does is proof that someone inserted the information that they got paid fair. If it really happend? Noone knows. Therefor Blockchain is a representation of what you feed into it nothing more and nothing less. At the moment it touches real life - as in the fair trade/payment for coffee bean harvesting - especially in countries where alot of payment is still for dayjob/cash - there's no way the Blockchain can assure that everything went the way it is stored as.

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FabHK 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes. The oracle problem. Because of it, the only blockchain use case is basically crypto (and other purely on-chain stuff, such as NFTs (well, they typically link to off-chain sources by URL, haha) and crypto kittens).

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dotancohen 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I have not seen this scenario, but I assume that a blockchain could more reliably and believably be made public, recording all the way down to the farmer, then could other technologies.

Blockchain enables transparency from the farmer to the consumer. It does not ensure that the farmer was not coerced.

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troupo 2 days ago | parent [-]

To make it simple to understand:

For example, international conglomerate using exclusively slave labor inputs "these bananas are small farmers fair trade bananas" into blockchain.

That's it. That is the "transparency".

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dotancohen 2 days ago | parent [-]

Right. That's a forgery - a lie. No blockchain could prevent that type of lie. What a blockchain could enable is honest transparency.

An attempt to pass off a lie as truth would be much more damaging to a company's reputation than would be just not addressing an issue. By addressing the issue and introducing a channel for transparency, the company is demonstrating that they are willing to put their reputation on the line.

I would agree that as a regulatory measure, this would not solve any problem. But as a self-imposed measure, it builds consumer trust.

	▲	troupo 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> No blockchain could prevent that type of lie. Indeed > What a blockchain could enable is honest transparency. Wat? > An attempt to pass off a lie as truth would be much more damaging to a company's reputation than would be just not addressing an issue. Do you perhaps live in reality? When was the last time "reputation" of a company was in any way shape or form damaged by any lies? > I would agree that as a regulatory measure, this would not solve any problem. But as a self-imposed measure, it builds consumer trust. Indeed, it solves no problems except imaginary ones from the land of fairy tales.