QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'

Yes I can guess an ID. So what? I don't understand the threat model here.

But if the goal is effectively unguessable, 64 bit numbers would be fine. That's less than a one in a million chance of guessing an ID, so trying to guess is harder than just looking at some real bottles and copying their numbers.

> simple self-sustained checker can confirm that bottle is indeed valid one

Unless the number was copied.

I don't share your anti-capitalist takes. You act as if everyone always knew this was a serious problem, and to some extent I think you're overstating the problem. Plastic is somewhat bad for us and the environment but it is also hugely beneficial and cost-effective. The solution to our ills is most likely to come in the form of a biodegradable polymer rather than glass bottles and metal cans.

>If consumers demanded glass, they'd charge us a premium and happily provide glass, and make a profit off our demand.

That is exactly what happens now. You can get soda and beer in glass but it costs more. Bottled wine costs more than similar boxed wine. I'm sure there is a small difference with many other products too.

>Sadly, consumers don't give a shit about the environment. If they did they would have demanded an end to disposable plastics decades ago, when it was widely known the kinds of pollution the packaging was causing. We didn't care then, we don't care now. Not enough to act, anyway.

They do care but plastic has been recycled for decades now. Perhaps it is not the most recyclable material but lots of consumers are on board with some kind of recycling system, and reuse plastic stuff in their own lives outside of commercial recycling.

>Very slowly, laws are being passed at local and state level to set deadlines to curtail or eliminate disposable products.

On this subject, paper straws are the worst and have been proven to exude toxic chemicals. To add insult to injury, you have to store them in plastic wrappers to be sure they stay dry.

Reducing the amount of plastic in use is generally a low priority for government. It's a slow problem with many solutions that don't involve banning things.

>They do it when they're afraid just fine; waiting for them to be afraid enough may be too late.

There's not an obvious "too late" for plastic. It's a slow problem. Even the seemingly huge amount of plastic out there can be picked up and handled in various ways. The bigger issue is the microplastics that are difficult to collect. The idea that you can drive up to buy a $7 drink in a plastic cup with a plastic lid, and be refused a straw that actually works, really pisses people off. There are much more important forms of pollution that could be addressed, like the artificial chemicals and pesticides in our food.

Another example of a bad policy is the ban on plastic bags. While this might make sense sometimes, every time someone forgets their bags or even runs out of bags unexpectedly during checkout, they end up buying bags anyway. The bags for sale are often restricted to the heavy reusable kind, which are made as cheap as possible for the occasion and are not attractive or durable enough to be saved indefinitely. These bags have been found to generate more waste in some cases than letting people do what they think is right. A lot of people use the ordinary thin plastic bags around the house until they fall apart anyway, and some stores collect them for recycling as well.

Given the IPv6 case, I will handle this one with care.

> can print fake cola codes for infinite refills

You misunderstood what kind of "refills" are being talked about here.

> Also, "one in a million" assuming this tech is only being used by this specific product. if anyone else is going to use the same schema for anything else, numbers will dry up much faster. bringing oats as valid cola bottle is funny. if you add prefix, it'll eat up these sweet sweet bytes

I completely disagree with how you're using numbers here. Whether a number is a valid coke ID has no relation to whether it's a valid oats ID.

The thing the ID is attached to already acts like a prefix, while costing 0 bits.

The only way this could possibly make a difference is if you're scanning through hundreds of thousands of other packages and checking if their numbers happen to be a valid coke ID so you can cut it out and stick it on a coke bottle, all to avoid printing it yourself. That sounds unlikely. In particular you still need to check every number, so you're basically using other packages as a very very slow RNG to save two cents of printing costs.

> also, 1/million is not that much - you can spam online check api (and you need one with just IDs) to filter out existing ones

Mass-spamming an API that has even the slightest of anti-spam measures is a pain in the ass, especially if you want more than a couple IDs. The threat of "just find one of the many billions of real bottles and copy the ID off it" is always there, so if technical attacks are orders of magnitude harder then they don't matter.