Minespider is tracking ethically sourced cobalt and is being used by major automotive companies, for example
https://www.minespider.com/
@feld @gsuberland@chaos.social Ah yes, Minespider, who have abandoned practically everything that could let one plausibly call it a 'blockchain', including - judging from the phrasing on their website - the decentralization part; https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/62fc1b4ed3d11fcdb917ace9/66e0446b13031b6e44ca418f_Whitepaper%20v0.36.pdf
@feld You wouldn't, which is why it's completely absurd to try and use a blockchain for this, which is entirely *about* trustless decentralization.
@feld ... no, they are not. We had 'immutable ledgers' decades before we had blockchains, because they are a comparatively trivial technology.
Blockchains, as originally introduced with Bitcoin, were built entirely out of prior work; the only novelty was the particular combination of existing techniques to (try and) achieve that previously-unachieved property of "trustless consensus".
I am well aware that a good part of the tech industry has tried to retroactively redefine "blockchain" to play into the hype without having to actually do anything new, but accepting and adopting those terms is not going to help you to have any sort of actually-useful conversation about blockchains.
Like I said, Minespider have abandoned everything that could let one plausibly call it a 'blockchain'. It isn't one. They, like everyone else with an ounce of sense, eventually realized that blockchains are a terrible fucking idea for this (as described in the original post) and quietly 'pivoted' to something else that's much older and much more established.
@feld And if you want a specific example: the work on Certificate Transparency predates even Litecoin, let alone any serious attempts at generalizing blockchains in a broader sense. And CT is not just an immutable ledger, it's a *distributed* immutable ledger (just not a trustless one).