There has not been a single valuable use, a single product, that actually improves anyone's day / process / life / anything. I am very open to changing my stance if someone presents evidence to the contrary.
Public ledgers can make a difference See https://ripple.com/ripplenet/on-demand-liquidity/
Imagine if the only way to send a message to someone was through fb messenger or WhatsApp, and then someone invented email. The UX might not be great, but the benefits are huge.
Additionally if the eth virtual computer can scale with very low gas costs, there’s a lot of accountancy and banking functions that can replaced with eth code. Potentially some legal functions as well.
Notary services / time stamping. But also noncustodian assets. Although still not usable for daily life, I think the more we move into digital, the more we will want and need better licensing/ownership of digital content. For example when blizzard bans your wow account, which is worth many hours and dollars.
Big tech has too much control over these things, and the road to get a response se or to go to court is way too long and expensive for the average joe
Still nothing stopping WOW from simply ignoring those assets as part of account deletion process, rendering them worthless.
Blizzard can ban WoW accounts and take away your hard-earned in-game assets, and that makes people unhappy. Therefore, because capitalism, a competitor to Blizzard's WoW can arise whose killer feature is "we technologically commit to not being able to take away your assets because those assets are distributed through a decentralized blockchain."
Of course, it's pretty far-fetched. The "banned account had lots of assets" problem happens to a tiny minority of people compared to how many enjoy WoW because Wizards and Goblins or whatever, so to compete with WoW on the basis of "we can't take away your assets and they can" is not going to appeal to anyone. You have to also be better than WoW in other aspects that would make people want to migrate.
But the general idea is, "if part of your offering is 'virtual assets' you can use this technology to commit yourself to never being able to take those assets away". Hence ICOs.
Say, switching my Venezuelan Bolivar for USD, without restrictions.
2. Fractional ownership and dividends for digital and real world assets, e.g. NFTs, real estate title
3. Tax optimization strategies
4. Hedges against nation-state fiscal policies that e.g. inflation - which in turn allow consumers and businesses to derisk investments
5. 24x7x365 financial transactions
6. tiny financial transactions without crazy fees
7. giant financial transactions without unnecessary paperwork or delays
I can keep going, but each is a multi-billion-dollar a year business.
How? No one credible has claimed it's a good investment. The most you'll get is people suggesting bitcoin as an alternative asset that's a small portion of your portfolio.
- Pressures existing systems (Fiat, Paypal ...) to improve and keep up.
- Gives options to people living in censored governments
- Shows us that one of our most foundational systems (Money) can be re-engineered using modern tech and experience of studying what happened in the past.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/world/middleeast/lebanon-...
Having said that, there's plenty of projects big and small that have merit. Granted, a lot of published "case studies" are just marketing fluff to attract search traffic, that shouldn't be an indictment of the technology itself which shows a lot of potential, especially where complex transactions need to be brokered between parties with competing interests.
DHL & Accenture have investigated and prototyped uses in supply chain logistics for pharmaceuticals -
- https://supplychaindigital.com/technology-4/dhl-and-accentur...
- https://www.dhl.com/au-en/home/insights-and-innovation/insig...
- [PDF warning DHL case study] dhl.com/content/dam/dhl/global/core/documents/pdf/glo-core-blockchain-trend-report.pdf
Banks are serious about blockchain for reconciliation -
- https://australianfintech.com.au/cba-westpac-back-r3-blockch...
Use case for trading distributed power generation with power ledger smart contracts -
https://www.powerledger.io/clients/tata-power-ddl-india
You'll find most of these projects are in prototype phase or early adoption, and as I said there's loads of disinformation, but if you filter through the crud and look for serious projects with demonstrated applications or investments you should be able to see the potential.
Again if you recall the mid 90's, companies like Amazon were just an online book shop, or Google was just an idea in a statistician's thesis. Far more ideas bombed that were successful; there was a time when the internet hadn't decided what to do about advertising and settled on Google's model. There was a bubble that popped and lots of investors were left in the lurch. But eventually the ideas that worked survived and these companies are the largest in the world today and spawned entire new industries.
In light of this, my view is that it's a stretch to say "scam after scam, that's all blockchain is." at this point, although there are plenty of scams surrounding it, definitely don't write it off entirely just yet.
Everyone I knew was using 90's web. Home pages, websites for companies, movies, etc. It just wasn't really monetized or centralized into the big tech brands you listed. There was already real use for it, even if it wasn't remotely close to its final product form.
There was very little scamming involved. Nothing the likes of which we see with ICOs, pump and dump schemes, etc.
There was also a real spirit of openness and transparency, people pushing open source, an advocacy for a "world wide web", etc. Blockchain is the opposite, where everyone is trying to carve out their own little kingdom and push their own scam coins up.
It’s provided a private money for the internet.
That helps people. It’s valuable.
A permissionless, censorshipless decentralised private money.
Other than Monero and ZEC (the latter of which has some issues for me which I posted about before) Grin is the only other project that isn’t a clone.
This is a real product, real people use it (without knowing that they do).
Instead of finding a bank or payment provider that hold the foreign currency you want to deliver somewhere and exchange it for you currency, this system converts you local currency to XRP send the XRP to the destination and sells it there for the local currency.
If you send money to the Philippines or Mexico you may have used it without knowing.