[wonton2]

I think the focus in the article and in the comments is all wrong. The benefit of blockchains is on the businesslevel. If you have several manufacturers, of course you can integrate with all their databases, but that requires an enourmous amount of managements and hours in meetings and implementation. The next step, which i guess some banks have done is to cooporate on a common solution which is operated and run by a commonly owned entity. This also requires tons of management and a whole new organization which eventually becomes its own business area. A third option is like uber for transporting goods, a huge independent third party which is efficient, but eventually gets too powerful, so people revert to one of the other solutions. Blockchains on the other hand has a model for distributing trust and operations. It provides a more general solution to a mexican standoff than months of meetings and long contracts. Your contract is embedded in the blockchain. Of course the blockchain needs to be updated and maintained, so i think the real issue with blockchains would be that people cannot agree to using a single one for a specific purpose. But then it is much easier to agree to using a blockchain than to use solution x provided by company y because of all the organizational overhead it could abstract away.

[atomical]

Most companies will adopt permissioned blockchains if they decide to use blockchain technology. It's just not common to expose your data and logic to people outside your organization even if encryption is involved. Right or wrong it's a culture thing. Because of that it's just another technology option like an API server backed by a relational database.

Blockchains and smart contracts are complicated. There have already been a large number of security issues. There is also a lot of research into making the technology performant. Picking a centralized authority is much less risky because the organization is betting on proven technology.