Escrow with shared programmable ownership, global value transfers completed in less than a hour, immutable public timestamps, self-owned online identity etc All impossible pre-blockchain
gnu-social existed long before blockchains, as did many other federated systems.
> shared programmable ownership
What does that mean?
> global value transfers completed in less than a hour
Customers of the same bank can do the same globally usually. It happens they're transferring "internal bank numbers" instead of real money, but all cryptocurrencies are also just proxies for money and both sender/receiver must be using the same crypto-currency. Not very different.
Also, paypal, snapcash, etc seem to work just fine without a blockchain.
> immutable public timestamps
The library of congress begs to differ. So does gnusocial (federated/distributed timestamp). Mailing lists were used for this purpose at some point too.
Things like freenet exist just fine without blockchains.
I'd argue that the rest of them were not impossible before blockchain. From my perspective blockchain just makes these easier/cheaper.