No. Blockchain was invented to solve one particular problem: distributed consensus on a sequence of transactions, where the choice of which transaction to inclu

No. Blockchain was invented to solve one particular problem: distributed consensus on a sequence of transactions, where the choice of which transaction to include from a set of conflicting transactions is irrelevant. The latter property here is key to understanding where blockchain is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend problem", ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send it to different recipients (and so they conflict and cannot both be included in the canonical list of transactions). A double spend is the result of the sender either (a) making a mistake, or (b) attempting fraud. In both cases the important property is that as long as only a single of these conflicting transactions is included, the systems works. For all the applications you list above, this property is not present. If I create a transaction in your "shipping blockchain" that says "shipment A moved to location X" and another, conflicting transaction that says "shipment A moved to location Y", then it's obviously important which transaction we include, since it must reflect the actual, physical location of "shipment A".