Article, Decentralized Exploitation https://hackernoon.com/the-rise-of-digital-neo-colonialism-rc1h3xdr
"The goal was to inform the consumer about the origin of their goods, and we believed that once informed, they would make better choices. Like most blockchain supply chain startups, we believed we could create a more fair environment for the farmers, that consumers would tip through blockchain, that things would get better for everyone.
A single coffee bean is almost worthless alone, it is only in bags of thousands of other beans that they have any value. Likewise, the data about a single coffee bean is worth so little that a farmer is incapable of extracting any value from it. Even cooperatives that represent scores of farmers are limited in their ability to extract value from the data of a single bean.
Of course, if you can build a supply chain pipeline that can capture the data about every bean, suddenly everything is different. With enough data you can create a comprehensive picture of the heath of harvests, the effect of fertilizers and farming methods, you can understand rainfall, climate change, and yields. You can look into the past and predict the future, correlate growing conditions, identify and eliminate inefficiencies and standardize quality. Most importantly, however, you can create an entirely new resource: data, and the more of it you collect, the more valuable it becomes."