Honestly the best use case is actually for the very financial services industry that the crypto community thinks they are supplanting. Distributed ledger with trusted confirmations + quicker and cheaper wires is actually pretty big. It's a rock solid use case that a couple of big banks have openly said they are working on. Of course, it's almost certain that any currency they move will probably end up pegged to a fiat, so that idea doesn't give people the warm and fuzzies, to say the least.

How the blockchain solution is better than SWIFT?

How about five?

* private transactions: your identity need not be associated with donating to wikileaks or buying a sex toy

* irreversible: no chargebacks or transaction reversals

* unseizable: protection against civil forfeiture, IRS account seizures for "structuring", etc

* remittance: send any amount of funds anywhere in the world with minimum fees with no 3rd party ever having access to funds

* exit from corrupt monetary policies: see Argentina, Venezuela

But apparently these don't apply to you personally so it may be best to continue swiping your Mastercard™.

Paranoid much?

In a world where someone will steal your account if you so much as look the other way, this is a good thing?

Because paying taxes is for chumps.

Tell us more about those fees... You want your transaction to happen when?

Replace corrupt monetary policy with corrupt money. Flawless.

Note that these applications are strictly about actual currency. This is not a counterpoint, I'm just pointing it out because I hear many people saying that the blockchain has many uses outside of just cryptocurrencies but I have yet to hear a compelling case.

>private transactions: your identity need not be associated with donating to wikileaks or buying a sex toy

We have to define "private", currently my purchase history is not exactly public even though some trusted entities do have access to it.

In the same way I keep getting conflicting viewpoints about transactions on the blockchain. Are they public or not? I ask because every time I point out that cryptocurrencies are a dream come true for anybody who's trying to evade taxes, launder money or corrupt politicians I always have somebody telling me that it's not true because with enough effort you can track money on the public blockchain. So which one is it?

>irreversible: no chargebacks or transaction reversals

As a consumer this is an obvious negative. As a seller it might also be because people will be more afraid to send money to somebody without reputation. So good for Amazon but bad for the little guy selling home made socks on ebay.

>unseizable: protection against civil forfeiture, IRS account seizures for "structuring", etc

Ah yeah, the "my government has issues so the obvious solution is to get rid of it" line of thought. Maybe you should work on fixing these weird idiosyncrasies instead of trying to find a way around them, because maybe you're being honest but I can assure you that there's a long line of thugs behind you waiting to use your "protection" scheme to evade taxes and regulations. You can't have a working government if you make taxes "opt-out".

>remittance: send any amount of funds anywhere in the world with minimum fees with no 3rd party ever having access to funds

That's only valid if you don't need any guarantees whatsoever (like a pure donation without counterparts or sending money to somebody you trust). If you try to buy something from an untrusted source you'll want a 3rd party to provide arbitration. No chargeback, remember?

As for the "minimum fees" we'll see about that when some cryptocurrency is actually used "at scale" to do this.

>exit from corrupt monetary policies: see Argentina, Venezuela

I can't offer any rebuttal to this but I wonder how much good it'd do. Rich people would be able to exfiltrate their money more easily to other countries and poor people will convert their 0peso into 0BTC. I'd be really curious to read a serious study about how things would've changed in Venezuela if they had switched to BTC before the crisis. I don't really believe in magic bullets, the failings of the Venezuelan economy are multiple and go way beyond a choice of currency.

I can't shake the feeling that if you put money out of the hands of the government you effectively give all the economy power to the rich people and it's effectively harming democracy. You seem to have a very USA-centric point of view (judging by your examples above) so I ask you: when you look at the state of the USA and its government, do you really think "damn, I really wish rich people had more power"?

Be fair. They're also useful for evading capital controls.