The underlying tech in a signed public ledger, using chaining methods and merkle trees to record things with non-repudiation, thats useful. I went to a meeting which included people from the Reserve Bank of Australia or the financial regulator, and they said that between nation states, settlement was about mutuality, and absent a regulator to tell you what to do, federated processes around things like this were entirely rational choices. Nothing whatsoever about Bitcoin, Ethereum, the hype machine, rug pulls, just the underlying tech using normal PKI and some data structures and HSM backed processes. The regulator said informally, in a regulated monopoly agreeing to use mutual (dis)trust methods like a chain would be acceptable as an audit method to the regulator. Nothing about you or me, nothing about hype. Mechanistic settlement methods amongst competitors in a reasonably transparent manner.

Some payment chains are painful. An awful lot of middlemen take a cut. Some payment chains impose burdens on the endpoint like 90 day settlement debts which could be avoided with some use of tech. Nothing about the hype, just modification to financial transactions, but they could be done other ways as well (as could the settlement ideas above)

NFT are the same logic as bearer bonds. They're useful to very specific situations of value transfer, and almost nothing else. The use isn't about the artwork on the front, its the posession of a statement of value. Like bonds, they get discounted. The value is therefore a function of the yield and the trust in the chain of sigs asserting its a debt to that value. Not identical, but the concept stripped of the ego element isn't that far off.

Please note I think bored ape and coins are stupid. I am not attempting to promote the hype.

AI is the same. LLMs are useful. There are functional tools in this. The sheer amount of capital being sunk into venture plays is however, disconnected from that utility.

Half-agree: "Blockchain" systems contain new and useful technology, but the useful technology is not new, and the new technology is not-so-useful. If we keep the useful stuff, we're basically back at regular old distributed databases.

The key blockchain requirement is allowing unrestricted node membership. From that flows a dramatic explosion of security issues, performance issues, and N-level deep workarounds.

In the case of a bunch of banks trying to keep each other honest, it's drastically simpler/faster/cheaper to allocate a certain number of fixed nodes to be run by different participants and trusted outside institutions.

One doesn't need to trust every node, just the a majority is unlikely to be suborned, and you'll know in advance which majorities are possible. The bank in Australia probably doesn't want or need to shift some of that responsibility outside the group, onto literally anybody who shows up with some computing power.

An analogy for cryptocurrency that I like is lasers. I remember reading an Usborne book about lasers as a kid and thinking they were the coolest thing ever and would doubtless find their way into every technology because glowing beams of pure light energy, how could they not transform the world!

Lasers turn out to be useful for... eye surgery, and pointing at things, and reading bits off plastic discs, and probably a handful of other niche things. There just aren't that many places where what they can do is actually needed, or better than other more pedestrian ways of accomplishing the same thing. I think the same is true of crypto, including NFTs.