What keeps the highly regulated world of aircraft from adopting a semi-public registry* of all relevant airplanes and all their parts + part history? There apparently is only a ridiculously small number of 40.000** different airplanes in the world! This database would fit on a single hard drive. * did someone say blockchain? (Planes and all their components could be NFT mintable by component producers) (I am a blockc…
No, blockchain still doesn't fit, because there's no reason to allow random keypairs to write to the network. The condition for writing to the database is whether your key is on a list of real vendors; the whole hashing/longest chain dance is superfluous.
The idea behind using blockchain for tracking provenance is that you can check if a widget with unique serial number number X has been produced, who currently possesses it, and whether it has already been used. It would also be possible for each manufacturer to maintain their own record, so blockchain is not the only solution, but it is a fairly good fit to this particular problem. As with manufacturers maintaining ownership records, it cannot absolutely prevent a counterfeit part being used, but since the part would have to come from the company who was the last holder of record for a specific genuine part, and the record for that genuine part would be marked as "consumed", normally there would be no financial motive to supply a counterfeit. (Supply to Russia might be a an exception).