I completely get the difference between physical and numerical data. This is an instance where QMC has given us pretty good insight into what they are working on. From Squires’ blog post:
QDs are incorporated into a product to create physical data (a “signature”) that is un-copiable and unique to every product such tagged. That unique signature is scanned – converted to numerical data – and stored in the blockchain. At some point down the road when the authenticity, provenance, etc. of needs to be verified, the physical signature is again scanned and digitized and the digitized signature is compared to the digitized signature stored in the block chain. The nature of blockchain (1) makes the original reference signature available to anyone who needs to check it, and (2) makes it all but impossible to insert fake signatures into the blockchain or change the data in the blockchain. Is there anything there that we disagree about?
There isn’t a single word in Squires’ post or in anything else from the company that suggests they are using QDs as a key to access the system or for cryptography. In fact, QMC tell us that security is based on “cryptography originally developed by the NSA.”
Also, as they have stated several times, this is intended to be an end-to-end solution. How impractical would it be if every person along the way, let alone every customer, needed a “physical key” to access the system?
In an attempt to establish that there must be more than meets the eye and therefore his baseless assumptions must be true, one person wrote:
However that is exactly what the company has said they are doing. They explain that it’s the nature of the tags and the ability to embed them that’s game-changing.
There is nothing about people carrying around magical “QD Physical Keys” that somehow unlock the system and encrypt/decrypt data optically without being digitized. Why do certain people need to imagine things the company has not said in order for the company’s product to be game-changing?
I’m on record early on in these pages that I think this is a huge opportunity, and unlike some other posters here, I don’t think there needs to be a bunch of embellishment and making up stuff for it to be a good opportunity.