That’s what people keep saying but I’ll start to believe it when any web3 tech has even a hypothetical consumer or business application outside of web3.

Name a non-speculative usecase

I mean, I'm far from an NFT buyer or fanboy, but what can smart contracts and distributed trust-less compute do?

Supply chain tracking is a fairly perfect match. An example in production usage today is https://simbachain.com/ and https://www.computerworld.com/article/3439843/how-pharma-wil... and a particularly interesting vaccine distribution database from IBM: https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/industries/vaccine-distributi... - or how about voting: An example in production usage today: https://www.govtech.com/products/utah-county-makes-history-w...

There is the obvious securities trading usages, but that may or may not qualify as speculative. Anyways, you could argue blockchain is a stupid tech for all those reasons and all the startups mentioned in these articles will fail - and fine, maybe you're right. Maybe postgres is better for all those jobs. But these are non-speculative use-cases. If they're the right fit for those problems -- well, I'm not running a crypto startup, so... But in the long expanse of history, I do believe trustless societies will eventually emerge.

Thanks for sharing the examples!

The obvious criticism is indeed that these use cases could be addressed—if not with Postgres—with Merkle trees, no? Like (at a quick glance) MediLedger wants auditability similar to (say) Cert Transparency, and is using a “permissioned” blockchain to do that. How that differs from a centralized or partially centralized model like CT isn’t obvious to me.

Perhaps more importantly, though, none of these examples seem like they demonstrate the supposed appeal of “Web3.0”: permissioned blockchains, by definition, do not have truly distributed ownership; the entire bullshit premise of Web3.0 from people like (ironically) a16z is that you get to own “digital assets.” Yet permissioned, partially centralized blockchains—-irrespective of whether Postgres would be a better solution!—-exhibit none of those characteristics, right?

If all the hype around “Web3.0” is just a way of saying “supply chain tracking will be done, at greater cost and complexity, in a distributed manner”, that doesn’t strike me as deserving of all the hype. What broad cultural or economic impacts will it have?

I'd expect a voting system to be unable to prove that any one voter voted in a certain way. I don't think that requirement is well suited for a blockchain?

There are a couple solutions to this. The simplest one could be for the government to publish a known public-key. Vote-data would be encrypted with the public key which only the election board has the private key to decrypt. This would ensure that no citizen could vote twice, each vote could be tracked to where, when, who, but not _what_, except by the election board.