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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

I would pay good money for a supply chain based “consumer reports” so I actually know what’s in my products eg

- medicines! - supplements - food - clothing

Clearly in the USA their is gigantic demand for organic / harmful chemical free products.

The article talks about a pharmacy that does just that - tests all the products before dispensing them and rejecting those that don't pass.

For food at least I think it may be somewhat amenable to some of the newer fingerprinting techniques (e.g. using DNA microarrays). I've been wondering why origin/content/quality validation for food based on actual biological science doesn't exist for years. I did biochemistry for undergrad, and some of those labs could be done in the average RV kitchen, and others could be packaged into test kits.

For supplements you should look at labdoor.com. They do independent lab tests for label accuracy and ingredient safety.

> I would pay good money for a supply chain based “consumer reports” so I actually know what’s in my products eg

That's already existed for decades, so why aren't you paying for it then?

Seems like a good differentiator for a retailer... Maybe online only retailer. Maybe someone like Walmart trying to compete with Amazon.

Amazon (ironically enough, given their counterfeiting problems) has been doing this for their Elements supplement brand.

Example: https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Elements-Multivitamin-Cultured...

You can scan a QR code and get the test results for the specific batch included in the bottle.

The FDA is intended to be this with teeth - clearly it has rather corrupted. What makes you imagine a private organization would be better?

It's not corrupted, but too small and underfunded, while the scope is huge. Really.

This could be an interesting case for blockchains. I normally am not a proponent of seeing everything thru that lens, but having a proper chain that is publicly verifiable is in the public’s interest. That said, there’s not a lot of incentive for people to reveal their supply chains — it’s often trade secret or hidden for a reason.

If there was a market behind it, then there might be a way. But good luck getting Samsung to tell you where their cobalt came from, or if some generic drug was made in a dangerous lab. Even if you knew it was Generic Factory 1736, it’s hard to know if that’s good or bad.

I carry a lot of guilt for having "oh, blockchains could help" thoughts quite a lot. A federally supported blockchain used as a public notary and other official functions, as you mentioned, seems like it may have a place in the future.

Someone really needs to create a version of the cloud to butt extension that replaces "blockchain" with "database".

What you're describing is a useful application for a _database_. Mixing "blockchain" into it would only hurt the viability of the database, not bring any obvious benefit.

Your comment makes so much more sense with the word database:

"A federally supported database used as a public notary and other official functions, as you mentioned, seems like it may have a place in the future."

Indeed.

Normally I’d agree with you, but given this is all about verification it might make sense to distribute both trust as well as usage.

You know, of course, blockchains do not magically solve the garbage-in garbage-out problem.

Of course not. But that’s true of any system. Instead, you’d have to rely on each piece of the chain feeling confident about what’s before them... if they are professional there should be non-technological ways to attack that.

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