And still, even on HN, the discussion of cryptocurrency is oscillating between totally different axioms? Some of us speak as prophetic market analysts and bring up "nails in coffins" and other crystal ball bull shit, and some of us wonder about the technology itself and understand that the price against the dollar only matters to gamblers.
Has anyone come up with a use case for blockchains yet, that isn't buying illegal drugs or money laundering? I keep seeing pie in the sky hypotheticals like "supply chain trust" from people who think farmers are etching their cucumbers with serial numbers, but I've yet to see any use case presented for a blockchain that has real utility and isn't better solved by existing processes or systems.
Even treating Bitcoin as a settlement layer, and saying that we have "an electronic bearer currency that is deterministically produced and cannot be forged" is pretty powerful as a use case.
I'm a huge skeptic on the remaining uses of "blockchain" such as it is. If we define "blockchain" as a one-sided Merkle tree, then we have things like git that qualify, that are very useful in their own right. Similarly log-based database updates are also chains of blocks that are used to represent immutable updates that can be combined into a mutable view of the present, and those are also useful in databases and filesystems. But a bitcoin-like blockchain is not novel or interesting in this regard.