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Comment by danielmg | Hacker News Reader

That's already a solved problem in the UK after the BSE crisis. From what I was told (by a friend who worked on it), it uses certificates to provide trust and verification. Uses a central database hosted by DEFRA. No blockchain needed.

https://secure.services.defra.gov.uk/wps/portal/ctso/

Everything you describe can be solved, in a better and more efficient way, by non-blockchain technologies.

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Part of this problem is that signed merkle trees are the solution to lots of problems, and block chain advocates say "Those are blockchains!" and then try to introduce the undesirable feature (forward looking hashes that require proofs), while crypto nuts have already been screaming about merkle trees forever.

It could be solved, but is it really ?

Shall I remind you of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal#UK_Inv...

The blockchain doesn't offer a technological solution that couldn't be done with a centralized authority (I particularly like the way passports rfid reading involves certificates signed by each country). But it offers means to achieve that even if nobody safe enough wants to host the bloody service.

That wasn't about the provenance of the meat but the production of the end products - e.g. pies etc. They were just dumping in bad meat in place of good.

Blockchain isn't going to solve that - you could put the ingredients in the on it and have them signed etc but at the end of the day humans are mixing the food.

Someone marks horse meat as cow meat on blockchain. How exactly blockchain solves that?

ot, but even as i would probably be a little dismayed to learn my burger wasn't made of what i thought it was... it's kind of amusing that horse meat causes a stir while cow meat doesn't it's all just a matter of what's normalized i guess.

Agreed. Yet there is a case: I think the use case is for those who would rather do without centralised government and rather have a libertarian polity.

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