SCM

JustSomeBadAdvice

> If we were to run servers with some sort of trustable certificate from a certificate authority, let's for example call it SSL or HTTPS, would that essentially make all the work done by the block chain pointless and we could just use a faster more centralised system? That doesn't work for money in all situations because we already do/tried that and there's numerous examples of the centralized systems/organizations causing havoc. They mostly work, they generally accomplish our goals, but their power has definitely been abused in the past. Those abuses in part were a big motivation for the creation of Bitcoin in the first place, which took Satoshi years of effort in secret. Forgive the longer answer but I think there's more to this question - A lot of people misunderstand how systems work and this leads them to make errant assumptions and draw conclusions from them. Even if the first point above weren't true, we still couldn't use a certificate authority type approach to solve what Blockchains can solve. Certificate authorities fundamentally don't **verify** anything. Some of them do, but many of them don't because in some situations, people and even small businesses in third world countries can't pass identity verifications because the country doesn't have a strong recordkeeping infrastructure that the CA's would need, which would lock many people from these countries out of hosting internet sites entirely or growing their legitimate business, reaching customers in developed countries, etc. What certificate authorities do is provide a chain-of-custody for SSL keys between organizations and end-users who haven't ever heard of eachother and may never interact, which allows them to communicate with public key encryption. The data involved is small, the updates are infrequent, and specific resolutions for a specific site/key can happen on-demand with verifiability due to the root certificates. There are very few conflicts that the central authorities need to arbitrate over. Thus the costs of operating a CA are low and the fees can be low. If we took the two closest examples - supply chain management and real estate recordkeeping - these properties break down immediately. The volume of data for SCM would be much larger, though still theoretically within what a blockchain could maintain. Fraud would definitely be a problem, and the CA's would be forced to do substantial verification to avoid end users accidentally trusting records that were never valid to begin with. These substantial operating costs would very quickly price out many producers in third world countries, the very people I'm suggesting we could include. In terms of real estate recordkeeping the datasize is smaller and updates less frequent, but the conflict and verifications become much much more difficult because there's real money available if exploited, real conflict between neighbors, courts, borders, and boundaries all involved. A blockchain would still perform this function better, so long as the controlling keys for each city/state/nation/region were correctly distributed (aka following the lines on maps). Each individual entity could authoritatively control their "piece" of the "map" (database), and anyone could read the public data and display it because it all follows the same rules & data structure (unlike what is done today). Is it going to happen the way I envision? Probably not, if I knew the future I'd already be rich. But it is a good application for Blockchains, and it would be freaking cool.

JoeOpus

No problem. It’s a very common concept for those working with SCM systems, PLM systems, ERP systems, any big consulting firm like PWC, Deloitte, KPMG, McKinsey, etc - we will all have exposure to these concepts. It is a big part of why Apple air freights the iPhone. A few hundred dollars of the iPhone price is due to air freight. They need to execute against demand expectations on day 1 and be able to reconcile demand with supply. This is in large part because they are planning obsolescence into their products, into their sales, production, and financial plans for the fiscal year. So, it is a very common concept that any electronics company with strong education should be aware of. Happy to discuss more but I am honestly surprised (or not surprised, because it’s…Reddit…) that people are just simply unaware of this concept. It’s common knowledge for those that consult this particular economic segment

JoeOpus

Yea BSI was who I was thinking of. Lots of nonprofit institutional bodies like them and GS1 within SCM. Just will take time to get traction, considering most large organizations make major changes at each fiscal year. More traction in the next 2-3 years would be great progress considering the barriers and lack of speed in the enterprise market