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Comment by brandonmenc | Hacker News Reader

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

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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?

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.

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