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Comment by Swenrekcah | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see how a database (which they’re probably running anyway) would help, unless it’s connected to all other ports in the world an cross-examined for duplicates.

Which sounds like a lot of work and I’m not sure port operators want to share that, although it would be really cool.

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They should use a blockchain!

I’ll see myself out…

It has been proposed in all serious several times - and then immediately the person proposing it was tarred and feathered, then disappeared by the relevant jurisdictions security services (only half kidding). I'd give you their names, but for some reason men wearing sunglasses and sitting in a van appear outside my house every time I consider it.

It’s probably people who think we don’t need gigawatts for a distributed ledger.

While they might consider THAT true, I suspect it has more to do with being able to track which companies and countries are doing what business with whom everywhere - especially if that includes countries they aren't supposed to be.

Tracking containers port to port everywhere would be a MOUNTAIN of useful intel.

Containers are already tracked. There's literally nothing stopping you from saying that container X is going to Italy when, in fact, it's going to Iran. Blockchain isn't magic.

Immutable ledgers only provide value when someone wants to fudge values. A unique constraint in a relational database can identify mistakes just fine.

As long as you trust the owner, administrator and developer of the database. I wouldn't.

Run Postgres yourself. If Postgres developers are going to compromise their own software, it isn’t going to be to mislabel your shipping containers.

Most of the info in databases is boring and nobody cares about maliciously changing it it.

If someone were really interested in changing the number on your shipping container, blockchain can’t prevent someone with a $1 can of spray paint from changing it.

Then others have to trust me.

> spray paint

Sure, but the point here is to not lose the records too, which someone could trivially change if they own the Postgres DB. When I have a shared record of a container and somebody repaints its SN, at least I know I lost it, and I can also easily claim that I did not forge the records too because they signed the record with their wallet.

Instead you trust the developer of the blockchain and of all the apps required to write data to and from it.

Because blockchain. Even though there are now dozens of instances of crypto developers messing up their own work.

Yes indeed, trusting something I can see and compute myself instead of trusting someone's promises. There's no way blockchain will ever be worse than just having to go along with it because there's no way to verify.

> I can see and compute myself

What exactly can you see and compute? The end result in the blockchain is the output of <something>, where <something> is any number of centralized actors putting data from opaque sources based on extremely complex contracts.

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