There has just been immense confusion about what blockchain technology is meant to enable because unfortunately, amidst all the hype, a ton of people who don't

There has just been immense confusion about what blockchain technology is meant to enable because unfortunately, amidst all the hype, a ton of people who don't understand the point of it have started to peddle the absolute non sense concept that is a private blockchain. These are actually better known as databases, and are obviously not a miracle innovation, they’re just SQL wrapped up in blockchain hype. And in most cases you’re just fine with SQL et al between a few responsible counterparties that can go through the court system if they need to but generally trust each other. The only true innovation is the decentralized public ledger. A properly decentralized public ledger is actually a horribly inefficient way to maintain a ledger, but this is necessary and by construct, because the only way you can have a secure immutabl'ish ledger (no human abstract creation is truly immutable) is to make amending it or the rules it follows highly democratic and expensive to change. The united states constution is a good analogy of a properly decentralized blockchain. From an economic impact perspective there is only one absolutely major groundbreaking application for this: to create monetary digital vehicles immune from centralized manipulation (read mostly, from inflationary interventions). The market value for money in the world is between 100-300 tn USD equivalent depending on what you count which is ballpark equivalent to the amount of real wealth in the world (that's a coincidence). This is by orders of magnitude the killer use case of cryptocurrencies, which incidentally was Satoshi’s original vision. After that, you can conceive of all sorts of other applications, but mostly smart contracts which can theoretically provide immutablish programmable transfers of wealth mechanisms, free of intermediaries or corrupt legal frameworks. This has tons of downsides and risks and the max valuation down the line is a fraction of the monetary use case, but it’s a thing that does get plenty of people excited and i'm sure some of it is potentially legit, especially in disfunctional countries. In general though the second you read private and blockchain used together, you can mostly roll your eyes and move on. EG JPM coin to name but the latest example.