[QuadrupleA]

I don't know the specifics but most suppliers don't want to deal with the hassle of retail and marketing, so it makes sense for distribution / retail gatekeepers to charge a fee. And smart contracts aren't going to magically guarantee someone will buy your corn.

Moreover, ETH transactions often run in the $100+ range now, mind-bogglingly expensive and inefficient. Those fees pay miners to waste electricity, hoard silicon, and scorch the earth. Ethereum has been switching to proof of stake "any day now" since it's inception 6 years ago. And even if they actually pull it off I don't see why staking $20k of crypto to participate is somehow better or more fair than spinning up a $4/month cloud VM to manage a 1000x more efficient, fast, and effective supply chain database with digital signatures.

There's a lot of utopian handwavey BS around crypto, but it seems to be turning out like other magic utopian solutions in human history (gurus, communism, etc.). Wish people would divert this time and energy into things that actually benefit society.

[yenwel]

Well I do know the specifics, I've worked on our farm. I've worked in and for processing plants and at food retailers. I did an engineering degree in agriculture with a minor in economics (plus some post grads in IT). We produced and sold our farm products at local farmers markets. I now work at the agricultural government agency of my local region. And I can tell you that the margins that those gatekeepers take are not proportional the service of marketing and distribution they provide. I'm not talking about magic. I'm talking about mathematics and logic in the form of proof systems that have the authority that would otherwise be relegated to central enforcers. There is distributed ledger technology that already uses proof of stake like cardano or polkadot. As for high transaction cost and scalability of pos you should look into zero knowledge proofs which allows to package a massive amount of transactions into one proof that hides a lot knowledge and still allows for checking transactions: https://starkware.co/

[QuadrupleA]

I defer to your domain expertise there, don't know much about the food industry and supply chain. Sounds like there are some monopolistic players & regulatory capture involved.

I don't think ZKP or blockchains are going to save you though. Say Cardano actually gets past their "Byron" ICO pump-and-dump phase and implements smart contracts, or Polkadot gets off the ground.

OK, so we have a fast, non-world-destroying blockchain computing platform and can freely write programs to exchange PolkaDots or Adas or whatever. So what? Now anyone and their brother can set up a futures exchange via smart contracts, and we can all trade PolkaDots for corn futures. Whose brother's exchange do we use? If a de-facto standard one arises, who enforces quality and resolves disputes if the produce isn't up to snuff? Blockchains tend to be immutable no-refund situations, and discourage the use of "oracles" from outside for human factors like the corn being moldy. Who regulates the exchange to prevent abuses on both sides? And couldn't MonopoliCorp still use its connections and infrastructure and reach to corner the market? You still need trucks, refrigeration, deals with grocery purchasers, etc. That's the actual important substance of the whole enterprise, not the system coordinating it. Couldn't you do all this on a non-blockchain computing platform, say with digital signatures, if you just got people to agree on one?

Not to mention the questionably-solvable problems of massive volatility in PolkaDots, unforseen smart contract bugs enabling and encouraging theft opportunities, constant hack attempts, potential that the whole platform could collapse if the currency collapses and nobody cares to stake it anymore.

[yenwel]

The farm commodity hedge markets are dominated by players who leverage private access and knowledge to make massive margins. I think decentralizing this market (by anyone and their brother) would certainly benefit producers and end consumers by increasing transparency and thus lowering these transaction costs and providing liquidity. What you are talking about are auctions (like for pigs, fish or flowers) and this is already invented, centralized and corrupted and they set prices for producers and consumers in secret meetings and calls (before that wasnt even outlawed). For distribution, how easy is it to set up an ecommerce shop and for distribution you have a lot of thurd party logistics service providers. By increasing competition between these service providers of distribution etc you would again lower costs for producers and prices for consumer instead of relying on massively vertically or horizontally integrated supply chain players. Few benefits from massive monoculture productions (certainly not producers, consumers or the environment). Do you really think there are no scandals in centralized quality control systems?

Talking about price volatility. Costs for producers and prices for consumers are increasing dramatically because central banks in the western world decided to print massive amounts of currency and buying zombie companies on the stock exchange. How are these currencies considered stable in any way? Look what is happening in is happening in Turkey or Lebanon. Even worse what the US is doing to the people of afghanistan.