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Comment by fishbone | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else think that the IBM commercial where they talk about tracking a tomato with a blockchain is laughable? Or is it just me?

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One of the few companies [0] in the space that I find interesting is doing exactly that.

Tracking the authenticity or safety of physical products changing many hands is a perfect application of distributed, tamper-proof databases.

[0] https://www.provenance.org

That is the third time this week here I've seen the word "provenance."

I had never encountered it before. Why is everyone now using it constantly on this site?

Perhaps the frequency illusion bias?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...

I know that's a thing, but am here for years and never encountered it. When I don't know a word I look it up so can't say I've never seen it even if I don't remember its meaning.

It's just the bias at work. That word's been used around here plenty ;)

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=provenance&sort=byDate&prefix&...

I first came upon 'provenance' in "Programming Pearls', Jon Bentley, 1986. The word has been traveling around hacker circles for some time.

But what good is tracking e.g. a tomato with a tamper proof database when the label on the tomato is easily tampered with?

Supply chain is an interesting case for blockchain. It doesn't eliminate the possibility of incorrect information being entered at some point in the chain. But there are probably still advantages to having transactions being immutable once they've been executed on a chain that's not under the control of any single party. Also smart contracts are potentially interesting.

But how do you stop someone from putting incorrect information, or outright lying in the first place?

It's complete crap. The saddest part is that they do have some amazing technical minds behind the scenes. They give their stage to sleazy marketing and salespeople who have no idea what they're talking about way too often.

Sounds an awful lot like Microsoft.

I think Microsoft has turned the corner.

Yes - Azure is genuinely good

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