The "Bitcoin" application is a tool useful for buying and selling recreational drugs without exposure to the physical risk posed by cash transactions. Edit: That is, the physical/financial risk posed to you by the other party or third-party robbers. Legal risk is probably also reduced: law-enforcement deanonymization attacks seem much less frequent than busting people with drugs on the street.
Blockchain-based markets in general enable transactions without revealing personally identifying information to the counterparty or platform while circumventing regulatory restrictions on conventional transactions.
> The "Bitcoin" application is a tool useful for buying and selling recreational drugs without exposure to the physical risk posed by cash transactions.
It hasn't been since at least 2018; authorities regularly seize millions worth of bitcoins together with drug dealers, and have been openly bragging about their de-anonymization successes as early as 2019.
> what's the authoritative history lies with Linus Torvalds.
I agree with your point about distributed consensus in general, but there isn't really a single authoritative history of linux, there are tons of important forks simultaneously maintained.
As for deanonymization, that doesn't seem to be very common. Compare to the rate at which people get busted by street cops for buying drugs.
What does that have to do with blockchain? Is bittorrent to you "blockchain for downloads" just because it's decentralized and has hashes?
> Git was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 for development of the Linux kernel
They use similar data structures, but blockchain is more than a Merkel tree, it also includes a consensus algorithm.
But I think the whole discussion is missing the point. Blockchain is mostly not trying to be a solution to engineering problems, but societal, "how do we do X without a trustworthy party involved". We already know how to do any given X with someone trustworthy involved.
And, fundamentally, that's how society works, no matter how much anarchists wish it didn't. It's almost always possible to agree to some party to be in charge, making blockchain mostly pointless, no matter how much money is poured in the technical details.