> it's a shame remote work isn't quite at that level to completely make physical location irrelevant. Maybe someday.
I worked remotely at Blackbird (https://blackbird.us/) and you could totally do this as a software engineer. It's great. Your can live in a cool place and the only thing you really need is a high speed internet connection.
When I initially started learning Rails, I was feeling similar. I was concerned about code feeling like "magic" and things happening w/o my understanding.
However, I got more comfortable with it and soon, for the most part, I LOVED the way everything was structured. Other frameworks just felt off.
I credit a lot of this to just understanding the internals of how Ruby works. I highly recommend the Well Grounded Rubyist. If you go through it, you'll be comfortable digging through your code, gems, etc. Things won't feel like magic and you'll be able to pinpoint how and why things are happening in your application.
Rails is one of the most productive web frameworks out there and once you know how things work, you're off to the races.
I think blockchains can help minimize trust even if it's dealing with assets outside the blockchain.
Let's use your beef example. The beef might come from a farm. It's certified organic. It gets shipped off to a distributor. The distributor sells it to a store. You go to a store and buy it.
In the current system, if the store is a bad actor (e.g. selling beef it claims is organic, when it's actually not) then you don't really have a way of knowing.
However, if the beef was tracked on the blockchain and transferred to you on the blockchain at the point of purchase, then you are no longer relying on just the store telling you it's organic. The claim is verified by chain of custody on the blockchain. So now multiple parties (the farm, distributor, and store) would have to cooperate to dupe you. You can still get defrauded by the store if they completely swap the beef. But, they would STILL have to purchase legitimate beef and transfer it on the blockchain to you. It would be harder to get away with it vs. just changing the label.
That's just one example of where it can minimize trust. But once more assets are tracked on the blockchain, you can start to do REALLY COOL things with them.
For example, imagine using real estate to get decentralized collateral backed loans on MakerDAO.
I can go on and on about this stuff...but it's really cool and we're just getting our feet wet with the technology.