Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

Like for example a distributed federate ledger is useful for checking/auditing/simplifying some federated tasks, like around supply-chain or to e.g. make it a bit more viable to interlink to game servers of the same game operated by different entities which have a real-mony related in-game economy (non of this are silver bullets, just make abuse harder).

> At the same time, the amount of coverage and attention it is getting and for a sustained period makes me believe I am missing something.

What you are missing is people gaining money through high risk investments, pyramid schemes. As well as rich people which hope this tech allows them to further avoid state control and taxes. I also have seen a bunch of times that some problems the US has are believed by tech, especially crypto people to be fundamental problems which need tech to be solved, while they pretty clearly are 100% fault of bad politics. Like personal banking in the US is crazy bad (for anyone not wealthy) that some very poor very unstable countries do a better job. I was competently shocked when I realized that in the US it's not the norm for poor people to have a bank accounts and neither is it trivial to safely send money between two private bank accounts in a not too long amount of time. If you either don't want to accept that such problems are caused by politics or accept it but don't think it can't be changed it's not hard to see crypto currencies as a good idea.

Also crypto can be good to avoid government control, in a stable countries this is quite often related to crime but if you life idk. in a autocratic country while still being crime technical it might be ethically "good" from a western point of view. Like sending money into an embargoed country for you family to live from is still technically circumventing an (lets assume for a moment) reasonable embargo, but is ethically ok because you help your family to survive.

Using more power[1] to process vastly more transactions makes it more efficient. There are over a billion credit card transactions per day as it is, and that doesn't include debit cards, wire transfers, BACS, Swift, PayPal, WU, AliPay, WeChat and all the others. And cash while we're at it, that's part of the system too.

[1]: Lets say it does, though transaction processing is only a small part of the financial industries. I don't even know how much the whole industry uses, let alone what fraction is transaction handling.

All the activities that regulators are designed to prevent are very successful in the crypto world.

I don't think crypto will fail or go bust; but I do think retail investors are completely abandoned by regulators who have a democratic mandate to protect them.

I suppose they don't want to be seen as stifling an innovative technology and politicians don't want to get blowback for efforts that would fail anyway.

Anyway, until we have global governance there will not be global regulation of the space so it will go on for many more decades.