| I am sad about all the hates of the blockchain technology. I do agree that most of the blockchain products are hype and have no real use cases, but that doesn't mean the blockchain technology is completely useless. Disclaimer: I work for a company building a blockchain ecosystem. It is not the silver bullet that magically solves all the problems, but it does improves few areas compare to other technologies, which are decentralization and distribution. Distribution is a mostly solved problem as we have many distributed database available so I won't go into details about it. Decentralization, is the core attribute of any blockchain technologies. No single entity needs to be trusted, instead the user have freedom to decide who to trust. In terms of currency, user do no need to trust a bank. He get to decide to choose which wallet app he trust (which itself is not an easy decision), which node implementation he trust, which blockchain protocol he trust. Or alternatively he may be able to create his own implementation if there are no reputable implementations available. This is not the case of banks. I am forced to use whatever mobile app the bank offers. I can't use an alternative implementation (at least no banks in my country allows). It have very limited (most of the time, zero) extensibility and customizability. I can't simply create a bank because I don't trust other banks. As a user, I don't have a choice. Blockchain technology does not solve the trust issue (track operator can fool the sensor to make it report false information), but it provides full transparent and allow user to choose who he trusts. No blockchain can't prevent dishonest seller make a copy of a real bottle with a token and fill with low quality wine. But user can see who issues this token and able to decide never buy wine from this sellers again. The problem is still not solved, but you cannot say blockchain does not improve the situation here. Yes centralized technology can help as well, but the user have to trust the centralized technology provider and the wine seller. In this case the centralized technology provider will have a large leverage on both the seller and customer. And we know it can be bad if a single entity have too much power (e.g. Facebook, Google). Yes, there are too many hypes on blockchain technologies. No, blockchain technologies are not useless. It gives the power back to consumer, instead of controlled by a few large entity. |