> A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
But the myth that people create amazing technology that has no use (TCP/IP, the computer), and then a decade later people discover what it's useful for, is just that: a myth.
It is even in the name. The "Internet" was not some monolithic project. It was a way of connecting the many different networks that had already been built.
My prescriptions are the real deal.
As a better escrow for exchanging goods, services.
I can verify if the trog on Fox News is just making shit up. (Verified sources, citations are baked into all content.)
> My prescriptions are the real deal.
How does the blockchain solve any of this? You still need a human to say "this Gucci handbag is not counterfeit". A human still needs to type in "yup, this prescription is real".
Accounting.
For this use case, think of blockchains as a shared ledger.
A blockchain-based shared ledger is only useful in case the participants don't trust each other. In which case you cannot do anything with it to help detecting counterfeits.
The original articles goes into this very problem. What's to stop your mango provider from spraying pesticides all over their mangoes and then entering "organic" into the ledger?
I'm not saying blockchains are a cure all. I'm saying I'm keenly interested in using shared ledgers for this use case.
My experiences with election integrity, for better or worse, inform my views (optimism). There was a lot of interest in auditing elections. And it was studied extensively.
For my part, I read up on Medicare fraud and forensic accounting, because they seemed to be the most mature related domains (at the time). My conclusion was that reducing fraud is best accomplished thru simplifying the accounting.
You still need relationships and face-to-face and "trust but verify".
My ultimate hope is that something like blockchains (not talking cryptocurrency, bitcoin, PoW) will somehow make the chasm between the physical and digital worlds smaller. Thereby reducing transaction costs, waste, fraud, uncertainty and so forth.