> they're not remotely close to being a solution to the sort of problems parties use escrow for
But you can encode fulfilment into a smart contract for physical goods, assuming that those physical goods have some digital representation on-chain. Discrepancies between the chain and the real world continue to be resolved through the court systems in various jurisdictions, but on-chain activity is just strong evidence that any court can rely on.
> a distributed ledger only has value over and above a non-distributed one if other parties worry about the centralised database manager tampering with records
An alternative viewpoint is that a centralized database manager can be seen as a potential risk. One of the general ways we progress in society is when we reduce sources of risk, and a permissioned blockchain where you need 2/3rds of a cabal to collude is a pretty clear reduction of risk compared to a centralized DB. (I mean, how would you keep track of whether a central DB has been tampered with? You'd probably maintain your own copy, reconcile the two periodically, and flag discrepancies if and when they happen. That's exactly what a blockchain is.)
To be clear, I'm pretty skeptical about blockchains in general, but this seems like a very compelling use case.
> But you can encode fulfilment into a smart contract for physical goods, assuming that those physical goods have some digital representation on-chain.
But why would I want to? Unlike a smart contract for some verifiable code-based outcome it doesn't offer any guarantees I get paid, which I still rely on the courts for, it just adds complexity and unfamiliar risk.
> An alternative viewpoint is that a centralized database manager can be seen as a potential risk
Sure, in theory it can be. But relative to all the other potential supply chain risks, the ERP cloud vendor colluding with a part of the supply chain to remove records from or silently update a datastore is pretty near the bottom of the list in terms of likelihood, expected cost and chances of it not being glaringly obvious to other parties and used as evidence of bad faith on their part in court.
To be clear, I'm not saying blockchain can't be used as a datastore, I'm saying that overall its about as useful for mitigating supply chain risk as insurance against your spouse committing identity fraud is for mitigating potential problems with marriage.
Well, the assumption is that unfamiliarity risk goes down as people get more familiar with the technology. There's certainly some added complexity but a blockchain is not that complex, it's just a git repo with some added functionality to repel hostile actors.
But you can encode fulfilment into a smart contract for physical goods, assuming that those physical goods have some digital representation on-chain. Discrepancies between the chain and the real world continue to be resolved through the court systems in various jurisdictions, but on-chain activity is just strong evidence that any court can rely on.
> a distributed ledger only has value over and above a non-distributed one if other parties worry about the centralised database manager tampering with records
An alternative viewpoint is that a centralized database manager can be seen as a potential risk. One of the general ways we progress in society is when we reduce sources of risk, and a permissioned blockchain where you need 2/3rds of a cabal to collude is a pretty clear reduction of risk compared to a centralized DB. (I mean, how would you keep track of whether a central DB has been tampered with? You'd probably maintain your own copy, reconcile the two periodically, and flag discrepancies if and when they happen. That's exactly what a blockchain is.)
To be clear, I'm pretty skeptical about blockchains in general, but this seems like a very compelling use case.