this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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Reminds me of Blockchain
It's not a fake or fundamentally useless technology, but everyone who doesn't understand it is rushing to figure out how they're gonna claim to use it.
Yeah, when someone just describes blockchain, saying "I guess we could use it for supply chain tracking or healthcare tracking or whatever" is a reasonable first impression.
The problems show up the second you start thinking about how to actually implement the damn thing. You don't need a blockchain for logistics or healthcare tracking. It has no inherent advantage over regular databases. It doesn't solve organisational issues. It's just a slow trustless distributed append-only database. It's good when you need a trustless distributed append-only database! Most people don't need one.
Same thing with AI technologies, just a bit different in that it's somewhat more useful. They're good and useful technologies and they have plenty of perfectly valid usecases. Then the tech bros started going "Maybe we could use AI for some weird wacky obscure niche and charge a lot of money for it?" or "we're going this wacky crap whether you want it or not, we don't care what it's necessary for us to do to make it happen, and we'll charge a lot of money for it".
https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-to-solve-supply-chain-challenges
So: A company had a problem with invoices. They made an invoice management system. The problem was solved. Wow. Never saw that coming.
Without the details, it's hard to see how blockchain specifically was the magic ingredient. Not saying it wasn't, just saying this was already a problem that was solved long before the blockchain.
The invoice management system is owned by the whole supply chain. It is not a database run by walmart.
The problem wasn't solved before blockchain because centralized databases do not have the administrative flexibility to respond to a changing supply chain. A central administrator only sees one layer deep.
What if - hear me out - you build a centralised database, and then give appropriate access to all of the actors in in the system? Like most people have been doing forever?
And isn't updating one centralised system actually more flexible than trying to manage a distributed system? Changes can easily be rolled to production when you only have one system to worry about.