I personally agree that Blockchain or distributed ledgers are overhyped for use cases where simple, centralized approaches to trust would go a lot farther.
Identity. Once you log into a website a MetaMask address, a lot of things begin to come into focus. Create as many as you want, move contents around, etc. It's a lot more empowered than google/fb oauth feudalism.
Physical and intellectual property registries. Could be far more efficient, accurate, and resilient to bad actors.
Property registries are one of those stupid ideas for blockchain. If someone was going to steal your property, they're not going to care what some blockchain says about it.
If you only need an informational registry for well-behaved cooperating parties, you don't need it to be completely trustless. There are many other ways to decentralize storage and ensure consensus when you don't require mexican-standoff level of distrust.
>Property registries are one of those stupid ideas for blockchain.
Specifically, the thing that is essential for most property registries is recognition and enforcement by a meat-space government. So, while a digital ledger is a good idea compared to, well, lots of existing property registries, decentralization/trustlessness isn’t important, adoption by a trustworthy and capable enforcer is.
So a bad actor gets a fraudulent invention registered. In the current system some people think really hard and then consider deleting it. This has many flaws, but the flaws are in the human bits. Where they write down their decisions is an implementation derail.
How will blockchain make it better? Unless you've figured out how to have a computer figure out what inventions should qualify for protection and what infringes on them, I don't see it.
You're focusing on patents. Countries operate copyright offices--clerks, submission fees, red tape, human error. With blockchain, I can produce and store an md5 of a audio file, pdf, or video for next to nothing. You now have cryptographic signed proof of generation at a particular time, and a system that stores the data perpetually. Yes, you still need courts and judges to adjudicate conflicts, I never said it was a 100% solution.
I'd prefer my deed committed to blockchain (by a government registrar) than held in a local instance of filemaker pro, or in a paper file cabinet, is where I was going.
The one example I can point to where maybe existing systems were improved through blockchain-like technology would be Certificate Transparency https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/ yet even then there's a lot of trust in browsers run by centralized actors to ensure the system works as expected. The system is further documented in https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/... and https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6962.html Also, https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-certificate-transpar... is a good read.