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> the "farm" selling you their romaine might actually be selling you romaine from somewhere else that they've repackaged.

Think about it from a game theory perspective. Under the status quo, each party in the supply chain maximizes their profit by lying about where their supplies came from. Whereas with DLT, each party maximizes their profit by being honest about where their supplies came from.

As an example, let's say you hijack you a truck and swap out expensive lettuce for cheap lettuce in a way that circumvents whatever tamper proofing technology has been applied. Stuff like this happens all the time currently, and is wildly profitable. (That's why if you go to a sushi restaurant and get a bunch of assorted sushi pieces or rolls, there is roughly a 0% chance that your meal will actually consist of what you ordered.)

With DLT though this is no longer profitable, because if you sell the cheap lettuce as expensive lettuce then you now have to sell the expensive lettuce as cheap lettuce, because each head or crate or whatever still needs to be traceable back to the source. This means that your total profit from the transaction is just whatever you would have made without cheating, plus your costs of hijacking the truck. So all in all, a substantial net loss.



Doesn't this require you to trust the source? And if you trust the source, there is no need for a blockchain?


Well, even if you trust the source, you still need to be able to access the transaction records.

You don't really need a distributed ledger for that,a centralised database run by an industry clearinghouse could serve the purpose just fine.

But maybe there are cases where a distributed ledger is easier or cheaper to establish than such a clearinghouse.


> Doesn't this require you to trust the source?

It allows you to know the source, which enables you to make a data-informed decision about whether or not you trust the source.

As opposed to the current status quo, where you can never even know the source so trust doesn't even come into the picture.




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