The bit that is a scam is a social phenomenon, not a technical phenomenon. It's tulips, Beanie Babies, housing market bubbles; not technical. Assets rising in p

The bit that is a scam is a social phenomenon, not a technical phenomenon. It's tulips, Beanie Babies, housing market bubbles; not technical. Assets rising in price are chased by people who want to surf the rise. What is interesting about distributed ledger consensus via proof of work only remains interesting when there's a disconnect between the economy and good government. If your government is corrupt, or your economy is corrupt, you want the two to be disconnected. The problem is that the latter - corrupt economies - dominate over the former. If you have a functioning government, you can use the legal system to enforce contracts, and then ledgers don't need to use proof of work. If you don't have a functioning government, or you can't let the legal system look at your contracts, then blockchain starts to look interesting.