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by parksy 1855 days ago
A couple of points, the first is criticising lack of real-world use-cases for nascent technology is like criticising the web in the mid 90's. It's like expecting the cart to lead the horse.

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.

2 comments

All of these commercial blockchains should really just be "traditional" databases. Byzantine fault tolerance is a ridiculous requirement for a project that runs inside a trusted networked, or between trusted peers. These companies are doing blockchain for PR and/or as projects with consultents, not as serious integrated software projects to solve actual supply chain management problems.
In comparing it to the mid 90s web, you miss three things:

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.