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Comment by newsbinator | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like one of the (few?) classes of problems that blockchain can solve best.

Get every pig tagged and on the blockchain. Then a quick scan tells you where it came from, where it's been, and who else it encountered along the way.

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Replace “blockchain” with “database” and everything you said still applies.

I'm no blockchain fanboy but I believe the distinguishing features are "decentralized", "permanent" and "verifiable". If you put that stuff in a database, someone can change the database.

If someone can change a database, then why couldn't someone change data before being entered into a blockchain?

That is still an issue but blockchain-ish tech solves the "double spend of pig". I.e. you can't sell the same pig to many slaughter houses.

Except when you own more than 30% of the pigs then you have a higher chance to double spend a pig

that is doubly true for the owner of the database,atleast with a chain you can tell when manipulation is going on(on a long enough timeline)

But if I can enter stuff into the blockchain (And presumably I can, you can't breed pigs by consensus...), why would i care about double-spend?

If I acquire some stolen pigs, or some pigs from a less than ideal lineage, I'll just enter them into the blockchain and say they're the result of breeding.

Blockchain works because it's verifiable. Breeding pigs, digging carbon (in its many forms) out of the ground, turning these things into other things isn't.

I'd presume that entering them into this blockchain would require submitting their biometrics, at which point it'd be indelibly recorded that you had 37 new pigs, 33 of which looked identical to pigs stolen last weekend. Or you could fabricate biometrics, at which point you're fine until you try to sell them and then someone notices that the pigs you have aren't the pigs you own in the system.

It also makes it harder to keep, say, 2000 untaxed pigs, plus the 1000 pigs you pay tax for. Then sell the untaxed as one of the 1000 official pigs, but each official pig gets sold 3 times, each to 3 slaughter houses. If everything is publicly recorded, such as on a blockchain, you can't get away with that as easily.

maybe try git

It has to be a blockchain in a trustless pig-to-pig architecture. I don't trust the pigs not to manipulate the database; the incentive structure and the game theory is just not right.

Yeah, encryption will ensure the farmer can't remove the tag and put the tag from another pig on a pig, or that when the tag was created, there was actually a physical pig!

Keep the context in mind: face recognition. Plastic surgery is expensive.

I wonder if a little bit of lipstick can defeat pig face recognition.

It's possible to tag animals immutably. For example by non-painful branding in a specific location on the skin (e.g. behind the right ear.)

Trying to modify that branding, in that location, would leave a noticeable mark.

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