Buying illegal drugs. That's literally it. I'm writing a book on this. (Nearly finished! Probably!) I have read thousands of pages of the worst PDF whitepapers

Buying illegal drugs. That's literally it. I'm writing a book on this. (Nearly finished! Probably!) I have read thousands of pages of the worst PDF whitepapers you can imagine. I have looked all over to see if there's a "there" there. As far as I can tell: 1. The only thing blockchain does in practice that anything else can't is decentralised cryptocurrencies. 2. The only thing decentralised cryptocurrencies do in practice that ActualMoney doesn't is markets for illicit goods and services. note the "in practice" - it's had eight years of "possibilities", by now I think we can look at what it's done. also, 3. the decentralisation isn't permanent - Proof of Work benefits from economies of scale, meaning mining recentralises, and this is exactly what happened from the FPGA era on. The usual business proposition for Blockchain(tm) is supply chain management. Blockchain doesn't solve any of the actual problems (bad data - it turns out that crooks don't put careful documentation of violations into the data, and bribe local inspectors and adjudicators) but does offer a monopoly position to the company defining the blockchain in question.