Why the future of blockchain lies in the marketplace

The blockchain could come in handy in many aspects of society but the main one that I see and that I want to focus on is in the marketplace. So this is how it would work, say you went to your favorite grocery store and you wanted to buy a banana that claimed to be organic, fair trade, and used environmentally friendly growing techniques. Now how would you know that what they are saying is actually true? You have to trust that the store you are shopping in will do some form of verification on these claims and that the company you are purchasing this product from would under law be required to tell the truth…but more times than not this is not the case. It is very easy for a company to lie on a product label or at the very least use misleading language to get the consumer to think something false, for example in the article How Food Labels Lie to You by Markham Heid he writes, ““There is no legal definition of ‘natural,’” says Steve Taylor, co-director of the Food Allergy Research and Resource Program at the University of Nebraska. While the FDA does have hard-and-fast rules surrounding some terms, others are not defined. So if you see “natural” or “all-natural” on a product label, that tells you next to nothing about what’s inside, Taylor explains.”

Now say you wanted to buy a t-shirt, how can you know that it wasn’t created in a sweatshop or with child labor? With that being said the only real way to know what is going on inside of the products you buy, how they are made, and who really makes them is by taking trust out of the equation and recording the entire process, and that is where blockchain comes in. If we create a system where we can record (on video) every step of the process for creating a product and save it onto a blockchain ledger that can then be viewed by a consumer simply by scanning a QR code on that product, then we could essentially solve the problems of companies lying about their products and give consumers complete transparency to what they are purchasing.

However a new problem does arise from this and that is, what if you were able to just fake the history of the ledger by adding false things to start with? That is why I believe video proof is the only way to really know how a product is created; and we would have to create the system in a way where companies couldn’t fake something on camera and do something else behind the scenes, we need multiple cameras that show the product being produced, transported away, and taken into a store consecutively. The same goes for housing, developers want to build for as low cost and as quickly as possible, commendable goals except in the process they completely disregard quality and energy efficiency, which is how you get the houses we have today. By recording the process a developer could not get away with building such low quality houses without the buyer knowing about it. Now this is where the real power of the blockchain lies, this has the power to create a real revolution in the way we do business.

That is why the team at tmrrw is attempting to pioneer this process and create the first brick & mortar as well as online marketplace in which every product is traceable on the blockchain from the origin to the final product. The store will be located in Los Angeles, CA and will only sell speciality goods that will come from relationships with the creator and local designer goods to ensure that every product can in fact be traced to its origin. Along with this we are creating what we call the House of Tomorrow, a house built above and beyond the highest Passivhaus standards that will be completely energy efficient, solar powered, and long lasting; and we will be recording the entire building process on the blockchain. We hope that through this we can give blockchain technologies a real world use and showcase it to the every day person.

See what tmrrw is doing at tmrrw.org