Blockchain’s Potentially Most Valued Use for Human Life

OK. I’m only a CPA with some legal experience background. Who else could be excited about a “distributed ledger”? My experience with software and its design is limited to being a systems analyst at IBM in the early ’70s. Hopefully you haven’t stopped reading and thrown this away. I think I have a valuable use for blockchain.

I also have a background in animal nutrition and how broad theory transfers over to human nutrition. What I’m interested in personally is the corrupt world of trade in, and labelling of, foods. Organic, country of origin, sourcing information purporting to have less pesticides or no GMOs, not mentioning exposure to glyphosates, or pretending to coming from small sustainable farms. All of which might have come from a swamp in Asia or a lying International food giant or anybody in between.

I’ve been inside Monsanto, whom I’d trust with nothing, and Unilever, in whom I have broad trust. In the area of foods, I trust European growers the most — and many still cheat. I rate USA growers/processors among the worst — and some are leaders in the field of healthy eating. And don’t get me started on the sugar industry or the medical drug industry.

Here is what I see the blockchain making possible what is impossible in any other way I know. It is currently possible to track an item on the grocery store shelf all the way from a particular farm, a particular field, or even a particular animal all the way to what I am buying. The only problem is that there is no way to discover if a trail is complete and honest. There is no way to track what inputs or destructions have been made during the processing chain. We, nor any government agency, can track even to a single slaughterhouse and certainly not through a complex processing chain. But it can be done with blockchain which can eliminate by making visible everything that has occurred.

Now maybe you’ve already explained in your article the principles what are already known and the structure that would make this possible without the blockchain. But I don’t think it exists. Having been in the animal feed chain as a CFO and working with a top nutritionist, I know of no way to trace this integrity. Was there dangerous fertilizer applications or dessication products used in growing of the grains that are being put into the feed? We didn’t really know.

And don’t believe the line that governments are controlling this. The day I drop my belief in the effects of “follow the money” and trust government regulation and intervention is the day I’m no longer breathing.

I think I could trust blockchain. Certainly more confidently that anything else I can imagine. I look forward to a response.