> Can you give me an exact, explicit, description of exactly how use of blockchain would have prevented (eg) the oft-cited melamine milk poisoning scandal in China?
I can't give you an exact, explicit description on __exactly__ how smiling more could have prevented one specific argument. But I can tell you that globally it will improve your relationships.
The point is that the track records are not only visible, in a standard format and accessible by all, but also with a permanent impossible to alter format.
So the data is more visible, more easily to a vastly greater number of people. And people can't rewrite history afterward.
You don't need to request papers to some kind of administration.
You don't need to scan thousands of papers.
You don't need to fight the PR trying to tell they never said that.
Again, it's not a silver bullet. But if you ever tried to do a citizen investigation, you knew that the process just to get the administrative data is excruciating.
The block chain helps with that, and so help citizen be part of their democratic process.
In turn, globally, this will help diminishing the number of problem than the one you describe. Not a specific instance, but the global number.
> It's basically by-passing a lot of bureaucracy
> That bureaucracy caught the problem.
Not the same bureaucracy. Besides, the chinese bureaucracy probably knew the probleme since day one and just "caught them" because they stopped paying something.
> Physical testing of the product uncovered the bad actor. How on earth would blockchain have helped?
By giving an easier opportunity to the public to have basic data to compare to the one they get if they choose to investigate.
Democracy is about having the people execicing power, not relying on institution to do everything.
It's like saying "how a knife is going to solve my hunger problem?". Well it won't. But it will make it easier to engage in the process of solving it.
> cut some of the news reporting middle ware
Data journalism is a thing.
> give a central source of truth (or lie) for a given issue
> There already is.
You never tried to investigate obviously. It's a maze of offices that don't talk to each others using incompatible format they make very hard to obtain. And that's just the official, potentially faked record.
You can't bust institutions all the time when they make bad move. But you can make it easier. The block chain can help with that. It makes fact checking easier, because half of what you need, the official story, is in one place, one format, accessible by all.
> What good does it bring if the lie is more visible? And if there's no bad actors then there was no problem anyway.
Visibility is everything. Try to ask your company to reveal salaries of each employees, including bosses. What do you think will happen ?
> Hype and money also go hand in hand.
That's not mutually exclusive with usefullness.
> I don't think you've refuted my point successfully. As always, I want to be convinced otherwise, but I'm just not hearing anything compelling.
It's my last attempt. It's ok. Not everybody needs to understand everything.