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Comment by jackfoxy | Hacker News Reader

The folks at https://sweetbridge.com/ make a case for supply chain being a natural fit. Some of the low hanging fruit here is international trade between less developed countries, where settlement has to be done in dollars, and independent truckers.

The thesis is that huge amounts of capital is tied up in invoice settlement all along the supply chain. (And supply chain refers to every thing from the dirt -- grown or mined -- all the way to the end consumer.) Settling invoices on the blockchain would eliminate a huge amount of friction and open the possibility of immediate low interest (or even no interest) loans on a substantial amount of outstanding invoices.

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What about a blockchain/distributed ledger improves supply chains in ways that a standard centralized database could not? Explain like I'm five.

I've been asking this exact question of blockchain enthusiasts and evangelists for over a year now, and have never received a clear response.

I understand the difference between a distributed ledger and a database, but in all use cases I've heard mentioned as ripe for blockchain derived innovation, not once has a blockchain really been necessary or even an improvement over a traditional database based solution.

To give you an idea of how buzzwordy this all is, my friend works in venture capital and was trying to explain to me how blockchain was going to change the world after he got back from a blockchain conference, saying that it would "revolutionize VR/AR, AI, etc...", technologies that have absolutely nothing to do with one another. I just laughed.

Nothing to do with each other, in the way that internet protocols would have nothing to do with how we purchase goods. Crypto creates a validated economy in a VR/AR world. Digital goods have a certain tangibility with crypto inside of a VR/AR environment, that creates true ownership.

I suspect it boils down to the international trade part. Which party would have control over the centralized database? Each participating nationality might prefer to not have that database under the control of any of the other nations. In any case, the centralization represents a single point of failure with potentially a fairly large risk.

I don't necessarily believe this myself, but here goes:

A database under control of any one entity is prone to undue influence by hacking or bribing or other leverage. An append-only database that is controlled by consensus of all club members is safe from malfeasance on the part of a minority. There is value in that. Of course this has nothing to do with mining coins and stuff.

Now you can argue the society already solved these problems with rigorous administrative processes around existing databases. I would reply that blockchain-based process may end up being cheaper and/or faster to settle and reconcile. In the same way the computing previously done by humans was turned over to machines. It may have looked like the problem is under control and there is nothing to solve here, but it turned out there was a lot to be gained from dramatically increased computational power.

One issue with cryptocoins is that the security demands are far higher because there is little recourse when hacks happen. Of course, you could put them in an exchange, but this is basically just reinventing banks.

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