Yeah, that’s the gravity of things that people don’t seem to understand. Yes, there can be unwanted side effects from puberty blockers, but they are relatively minor. On the other hand, one possible side effect for people that are willing to brave those puberty blocker side effects but aren’t allowed to do so is suicide. This is unfortunately often life or death.

Blockchain is the shitty reinvention of PGP, my dude. I don’t agree to this silly retronym for nearly 50 year old cryptographic methods. Yes, if you remove all the supposed advancements and advantages of blockchain, you’re left with the cryptographic foundation which was the only thing that had merit. Congratulations.

It’s not a blockchain. It’s closer to a series of forwarded emails with certificate signing. Who gets to add the next record? How about the party that is doing that step of processing in the supply chain. And I have a great idea for protecting the keys. It’s called asymmetric key pairs. You can verify a signature using a public key without having the private key required to be able to generate that signature.

It’s somewhat hyperbolic, but in relative terms, it is pretty wasteful to implement it with a blockchain over what I just suggested. Cryptographic consensus doesn’t solve anything for the given example that the verifiable chain of custody in my proposed alternative does not and there’s zero way it’s less expensive than a bunch of asymmetric signatures that can be verified offline on demand. If anything, it’s better than a blockchain since it would only require a majority of parties to be complicit in a lie to rewrite history in a blockchain full of parties that have no business with any given transaction other than to enforce immutability whereas it would require every single node in the chain of custody before you to be complicit in my proposal.

And I’m surprised that the rainforest thing confuses you. It and burning tires are the go-to colloquialisms for complaining about things that are unnecessarily environmentally hostile, particularly when talking about crypto crap. But yeah, blockchains are a solution in search of a problem, so the derision is intentional. There’s no legitimate problem that can be solved with blockchain that can’t be solved in a better way. Cryptocurrency only in theory and this supply chain problem are the closest it gets to blockchain making sense and it still fails to be better than non-blockchain alternatives.

Yeah, you would only need to have every single private key for all nodes that follow you in the supply chain. Super trivial.

You could do literally the same thing with a series of private key signed envelopes containing the prior chain of signed content. Boom, verifiable chain of custody without any rainforests being burned down.