I have been asking that for years without getting a good answer. It's a really cool technology! I wanted to use it for something!
But cryptotulips aside, every real-world use case I've looked at can be solved some other way (e.g., real-time published transaction logs). Humans are pretty good at creating trust contexts (see, e.g., 99% of commerce), and they're quite averse to doing anything significant in truly trustless contexts.
Almost nothing is a unique solution to a set of problems. Just because the problems that distributed ledger technologies address can be solved in a different way doesn't mean that to do so is the right business decision.
Sure. And since this is an obvious fact, I figured most people would read that in. But just to be clear, I mean "solved more effectively some other way".
Blockchains in particular carry a business penalty for a few reasons. One is that they're novel. As Dan McKinley says, we should "choose boring technology" [1] unless we have a strong incentive not to. Blockchain expertise, to the extent that it exists, is bid up in the marketplace, giving another excellent reason to pick something else. A third is that the vigorous blockchain hype has created a fair bit of blockchain skepticism in reaction. I know people looking for work that won't even talk to blockchain companies. And then we have questions about security, efficiency, reliability, and all the other operational concerns that one mainly learns through hard lessons (hopefully other people's hard lessons written up for the rest of us to read).
Sure, but PoW is (by design) computationally expensive, so any blockchain solution has the burden of showing why it's sufficiently better than the alternative to merit the extra cost.
Another problem is that if your nice blockchain has N computers in it, someone can go to AWS and add N+1 and take over your network. You basically have to blow more money on PoW than the network is worth _constantly_.
Or you can have a "private blockchain", which defeats the purpose entirely.
Yup. The only fields where Bitcoin et al have an obvious advantages is scams, fraud, speculation, money laundering, and a little light drug crime and extortion. Bitcoin has many theoretical use cases, but possibly none that are legitimate, socially useful, and in practice better than alternatives. And we've had nearly 10 years for those uses to appear.
But cryptotulips aside, every real-world use case I've looked at can be solved some other way (e.g., real-time published transaction logs). Humans are pretty good at creating trust contexts (see, e.g., 99% of commerce), and they're quite averse to doing anything significant in truly trustless contexts.