this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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The thing is, what use case can benefit from a blockchain?
Scamming, gambling, crime and speculation benefited from the lack of regulation, but barely cared about the underlying concept of a bitcoin.
But for anything real, much better solutions have existed for decades or centuries.
Blockchain is a solution without a problem and has been that for 25 years now.
If you have a solution that hasn't found a problem in 25 years, chances are that there will never be an actual problem that solution would solve.
So the killer apps of blockchain remain scamming, gambling, speculation and crime. Until there are more stringent regulations, then they'll go back to Western Union and Paysafe cards.
For technological innovation to take place, two things need to happen. First, the idea needs to occur in the first place and second the idea has to be adopted in a widespread way. Many examples of technology we use were invented many times in the past and applied to processes where it didn't take. Because of this I think it's very possible that innovative people throughout the world have indeed come up with use cases for this technology which could fundamentally improve something which we are not aware of because for whatever reason the idea hasn't spread.
Tech specialists are not often also expert marketers for their own ideas. At the same time, expert marketers involved with blockchain technology are typically involved on the scamming side so even if an idea is offered to the public which would otherwise sell itself it wouldn't have a chance in this environment. Blockchain experts, being primed to view this technology in its current context, may not even recognize how powerful a non-traditional use might be.
This is all speculation of course, but this is why I'm not ready to rule the technology out entirely.
I won't argue there aren't some use cases for it, but it was massively oversold for what it actually is. It's essentially just shared spreadsheets, but almost always described in a way that make it seem inscrutable to most people (further sinking any propect of mass-adoption) and cool to people who want to feel like they're intelligent and in-the-know about tech. And it was pushed primarily for things it was unsuited for, like replacing regulated banks with FDIC insurance.
I think it has potential niche uses, though. Not every technology has to be widespread or applied to a wide variety of different things.
Tbh I think the same overselling/over-applying is happening to large language models/LLM "AI" now, though at least LLMs legitimately do have a lot of potential use cases. Just not as many as the everything people are trying to apply it to, and not as overpoweringly as many assume.