One thing I have been thinking about lately is how
Blockchain could help solve problems of counterfeiting in the wine industry.
In our Iniskillin case, we learned about the problems of
cheap counterfeit icewine in China and what it has done for consumer
introduction to the category. There are two applications that I think could be
interesting:
1.
Verification of a varietal – e.g. confirming
that a bottle is actually champagne or ice wine or even that is from a certain
region e.g. that is Livermore wine
2.
Verification of a specific product type (e.g. that
a bottle is a ’82 Chateux Margaux), especially as it changes hands over the
course of its life
Would be curious if any other classmates who are
Blockchain-saavy have thoughts on if this would work!
I am certainly not an expert on blockchain, but do have some understanding of the fundamentals.
ReplyDeleteA good heuristic for thinking about whether an application makes sense for blockchain is considering the following questions:
1. Do you need a database? Do you need people to write to it?
2. Do these people trust each other? Do they have one person or entity in common that they can trust?
If you answered: Yes, No, then further exploring a blockchain application makes sense from more than just a PR perspective.
To me, it is not obvious that blockchain would be a natural pairing for your first point. While blockchain could certainly accomplish this, it would likely be much easier to use a plain old database. The appellation d'origine contrôlée's of the world, and thus the certification of a varietal, are already reliant on a trusted common entity. Thus, why not extend these trusted common entities to set up some sort of centralized tracking system. This could be much more secure and practical.
In terms your second point, more of a tracking application, blockchain could make more sense. However, there then arises how one would write such a protocol. Would it be written from scratch or perhaps on Ethereum or Neo? What incentives are there for miners/validators/node maintainers? Who are these individuals. Who is supplying computational power to this protocol? Why are they doing it? The answers to the following questions are not obvious to me. Would love to hear anyone's thoughts on those.