Note that this ignores the huge expense of measuring and storing all of this data, but I've seen some interest in these use cases in Asia, especially for staple crops like rice.
More advanced systems consider using third party, tamper proof scanning systems and packaging. Again, the costs of these systems are quite high, especially for food, but there are physical ways to reduce fraud if the data holds enough value.
Someone who fakes products can read the blockchain and print fake labels based on what is there.
> This lets you investigate and file complaints on the public blockchain. Think of it like a review of a company's supply chain reliability.
So the blockchain in this case is used as company review database? How is a blockchain useful for that?
A blockchain is useful as a review database because you have guarantees that the reviews came from the claimed reviewer. This reduces fake claim fraud, which you might, for example, see in restaurant reviews. The reputation of the purchasing company is also at stake when they make claims that another company committed fraud. You want good guarantees that information came from the party it's ascribed to. It's reputation building in a scenario without mutual trust.
> use case where I personally see the benefit
This is just infrastructure (as it should be), right now the middlemen are very expensive because of all the paper documents going between companies, and all the people hired to go over all of them. The usual arguments for these projects are:
- Cheaper
- Quicker decision making & communication
- Less fraud & errors
For us consumers that would probably result in cheaper apples in the the grocery store I guess.
Anyway, I'm really curious to see what people come up with! And yes, being faster and cheaper is summing up logisitcs pretty well! ;-)
I'm no expert on fraud, but I think most of it comes when data enters a system. With a blockchain (or any digital system really) you can easily check that your data stays consistent (when it needs to be between different documents and contracts). But if the guy entering how many tons of apple are in this container is lying about it a blockchain won't really help you.