You're not missing anything. I've developed a prototype blockchain for a supply chain before at the behest of a non-technical manager at some point. You hit the

You're not missing anything. I've developed a prototype blockchain for a supply chain before at the behest of a non-technical manager at some point. You hit the nail on the head with the problem of crossing into the real world. You can't validate the real world object mathematically, so if you lie to the blockchain, there's no way to tell. So far the only use case that I can really find for this are digital identity systems where the blockchain itself serves a double purpose as both a highly redundant system, and a byzantine fault tolerant distributed storage system. I can see the value in being able to maintain a strong ledger of ID uses. The EU looked into this from what I understand, and I think they stood up a system for this kind of thing. My big TLDR from working on chaincode and stuff like that is this: if your goal is to have a high security digital asset (eg: tokens and ID certs), then a blockchain might be useful. If your goal is to interface with the real world, then you're just going to be chaining yourself to a bulky inelegant solution that won't even address your core problem.