A: Possibly A Bottle, A Cork and A Label for Coffee Q: What is Blockchain?

Blockchain is a technology in search of work, or more work, and it will get it because it aids people in archiving and managing data. It does so while protecting that data and people seem to especially like that part.

As human beings, it is our job, it is becoming increasingly apparent, to collect, manage and process information — it seems to be instinctual, we like to chew up and digest information, and then make a record of it — even when there is no apparent benefit.  We play chess, listen to music, and watch TV. Just drinking a cup of coffee is endlessly fascinating to us – but it has no calories and besides some caffeine, just information. So too wine, spirits, and beer; sure, there’s a buzz, but there’s also a story behind every sip, and that buzz let’s us grandly extrapolate that info, we work with information, but we play with it too. What are you doing reading this, for example? Really, think about it, why?

But that really isn’t the point, and, so sue me: I digressed.

Anyway, the real point here is that what coffee farmers have always needed is a bottle, a cork and a label. This is what the folks who grow the grapes at Latour have, as do those at Domaines de la Romanée Conti. They grow the grapes,  they make the juice of that fruit into wine and they get to sell it based on the quality of their previous efforts.  Coffee farmers who do a great job, year in and year out, might get to sell their coffee forward for two or three years, but the buyer always has the option of rejecting their future efforts and the coffee farmer doesn’t get to make the beans into immediately drinkable coffee, they have to leave that to others, and if the coffee’s good, the brewers often take a large share of the credit for that.

Blockchain, then, if and when it can irrefutably go back to a specific farm via genetic and chemical signatures, will be able to secure more equity for the farmer. This is what happened with the grapes that get made into wine, before folks knew about digital signatures and secure encryption. The grape farmers put their produce into bottles and put corks into those full bottles that had their names and emblems and crests (logos) on them.  They also labeled those bottles and sometimes put numbers on those bottles, they worked to find the best adhesives they could find, and then they sealed those corked bottles with molten wax or (formerly) lead. They might have also had specific bottles made for them that only the farmers in their area, if not their own farm, could bottle their wine in. They fought for government protection of the right to use their labels, bottles and corks. 

Blockchain will also help wine makers better guarantee the provenance of their wines to wine drinkers and collectors.

All of this is stuff coffee farmers can’t do, but blockchain technology, by taking a specific handful of beans back to their farm, specifically, inarguably, has the possibility of giving farmers a similar level of protection that producers of estate bottled wines presently enjoy, and with that, equity. Bon chance, le blockchaine!

The problem I have with this (and it may simply be that, my problem) is that it seems that the information going into the encrypted blockchain silo might be garbage to begin with. Who or what prevents that from happening? If it’s like Wikipedia (everyone checking everyone else) then why does it need to be encrypted? It makes sense that Bitcoin needs to be encrypted, but it’s self-referential, the Bitcoins exist because the encrypted digital trail says they do…but a coffee exists whether a particular blockchain entry documents it or not. 

(And, yes, this is posted in memory of Alex Trebek.)