There are many dreams around the use of the blockchain for tracking products through a supply chain but at their heart is often an important step missing.
Bitcoin is a currency built with the blockchain, a technology that allows developers to make unique, provable, unalterable “blocks,” attach them together (thus the “chain”), and keep track of every transaction occurring on said chain. You can see it as a gigantic, shared, digital ledger.
A more precise and very trendy version of the supply chain case is the idea of tracking the provenance of more organic “things,” like a box of mangoes, a free-range, no-antibiotic chicken, a roll of cashmere wool from a specific producer, a bag of organic fair-trade beans for a highfalutin coffee shop, etc. This way the consumer could know exactly where the product came from, how it was produced, how it was shipped, etc.
The end goal is laudable and the blockchain might even be the right solution. But here’s a trick for the next supply chain blockchain idea you hear about (or almost any blockchain project): ask if the process is already digital. As mentioned above, many of these concepts are actually looking at a largely un-optimized and analog system. The benefits heralded for a blockchain transition are dependent on first making everything digital: contracts, shipping bills, customs checks, etc. Attaching unique identifiers to each and making everything trackable might work well with a blockchain, but think of the hand-wavy assumption that a massive project would make it all digital in the first place. Then think of the scope of what that means. Still sounds simple?
Making everything convenient also makes everything—including us— uniform and boring. Let’s look for seams, for the slow, the difficult, the inconvenient.