For blockchain to be valuable there needs to be an otherwise unsolvable coordination problem. One way the problem can be unsolvable is not to be literally unso

For blockchain to be valuable there needs to be an otherwise unsolvable coordination problem. One way the problem can be unsolvable is not to be literally unsolvable but philosophically unsolvable, which is why bitcoin itself is probably a legitimately good application of the idea. The anarchic ideal is to not trust anyone in particular with controlling money, and any actor who says "no trust me, I'll do it right" is probably less trustworthy for having said that, so it seems unsolvable. So a 'self-organizing' coordination is somewhat necessary, essentially for the same reasons we like democracies more than autocracies. (uh but proof of work is evil, so, just cause it's a good usecase doesn't mean it should exist.) Besides that, most of the 'coordination problems' that people purport to want blockchains for seem to be simple cases of glaciation and incompetence. If you can't reconcile accounts across banks / supply chains / etc efficiently, your industry just sucks technologically and needs to get it together, and it'll still suck when you have a blockchain making your IT more expensive, but at least then you don't have to reach consensus on protocols so good for you I guess? I would love to hear of other useful cases of otherwise-unsolvable coordination problems, but I really can't remember any right now. On the other hand, ETH-like cases are completely legitimate uses of blockchain-like things ('running code in the ether' is not something you can do any other way, basically by definition, and is also just _cool_), but they are rather different and not directly comparable.