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Comment on guys what the heck theyre putting micro chips in the cheese and using blockchains to track the micro chips

No? Barcodes and QR codes do not have enough information for unique identification. (Well they could but they start getting bigger and bigger)

But the real issue is needing these codes tracked and audited in a public manner. Instead of having a third party company trusted with all the cheese, you use a Blockchain with a public ledger. This doesn’t even require much processing power since there’s no incentive to mine as many blocks as possible.

I hate cryptobros but logistics is a good use for the tech. Tech is tech, not all use cases are bad.

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NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Barcodes and QR codes do not have enough information for unique identification. (Well they could but they start getting bigger and bigger)

This is not really true. A 16-digit decimal code gives you 10 quadrillion unique numbers. FedEx handled ~3 billion packages in 2024, so at that rate it would take them more than 3 million years to use up the ID space. You don’t need ridiculously long strings for useful package ID codes.

If you stored the 16 digits as ASCII characters (7 bits each) it would be all of 112 bits of data. The Micro QR format is more than enough to represent that data, with room to spare for error correction. If you used alphanumeric instead of decimal you’d have 62^16 unique IDs (UC + LC + 0-9), still only 16 ASCII characters (112 bits), and at that point you’re more worried about the sun burning out than you are about running out of package ID codes.

But the real issue is needing these codes tracked and audited in a public manner. Instead of having a third party company trusted with all the cheese, you use a Blockchain with a public ledger. This doesn’t even require much processing power since there’s no incentive to mine as many blocks as possible.

If you want the tracking to be useful, then every time a package passes through a handling station the ID needs to be scanned and the ledger updated indicating the transfer of the package ID from one station to the other. Then every node on the blockchain network needs to update their copy of the ledger with the new transaction data. Never mind mining, if you’re handling millions of packages per day then updating the ledger will create a stupid amount of network traffic and just eat processing power. Also, correcting any errors that get written into the ledger due to some handling failure will be extremely difficult if not impossible.

Without mining, what incentive would there be for anyone besides the actual shipping company to host a blockchain node for this? How would it not still be “a third party company trusted with all the cheese”?

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