As I've learned a bit about blockchain, I feel cryptocurrency is distracting from the broader implications of the technology. It's going to be hard enough for non-technical users to see the underlying value of immutable, distributed data and applications, so that conflation is unfortunate.

The technology has existed for many years already, and it has already made 'broader implications', see git. The only thing new about it is that people now call it 'blockchain' instead of a merkle tree. The reason banks and governments don't use better technology to track land titles or whatever other applications is that they're always slow to adopt technology, not because 'blockchain' is a new concept

But this isn't really the case. Both git and blockchain track a history of actions, true, the difference is that in git anyone can rewrite history at any time and there is then no way to agree amongst untrusted parties whose history is the true one. With blockchain, there is. That's the innovation, that's what makes blockchain novel.

As we've seen many times now immutability is not a strong property (indeed, none of the properties provided by blockchains are) of them, so not all that useful. E.g. Ethereum's various hard forks to un-do things.

In a manner of speaking, "history is written by the victors" applies to blockchains in more way than one (miners, orgs, hardforks, ...)

Ethereum has had exactly one hard fork to undo something. All the rest were protocol upgrades.

Blockchain without Bitcoin is not an innovation. How do you incentivize people to secure the network?

It's actually very similar to the stock market, it's just that there's no company backing it and there's no rules. It's why people were warned against investing so much not that long ago.

In Europe meanwhile, investing in the stock market is getting harder and harder, as new european rules (e.g. MIFID II) make any stock broker require to fill in a test and whatnot to prove basic stock market knowledge and competency, plus accept the risk to lose money explicitly.

There's a lot of people that invested money in the stock market they couldn't lose, due to promises of huge returns. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Well I trust the stock market more cause normal people invested in it and not mostly weird internet libertarians who thought Obama was going to take their savings and drug dealers (I'm sure other people were investing in Bitcoin in 2011 but these are the guys I was aware of)