Not having to speak to anyone to do it. I don't know if blockchain is going to go anywhere but I think there's inherent advantages in not talking to anyone (and being able to do it programatically) to do banking-like things. What you get in exchange is lack of security, no recourse when things go wrong, and possibly being in the same space as criminals. But there's a palpable advantage to not having to interact with any humans in order to do things that historically require a lot of meat space interactions that now can be automated by anyone in their home.

It's like having access to a completely deregulated bank ran by the mafia that has an API anyone can use. I think there's use cases for that, though maybe not the ones the community usually mentions.

But like.....what kind of things can you do without interacting with people when using a blockchain? Name anything. My insurance policy I bought online and I can manage entirely online, change the address, the car, the add-ons, add and remove drivers as well as cars......what exactly is blockchain allowing me to do here that I can't do already?

Same with the bank. I don't think I ever had to speak to my bank in the 8 years I've been with them, or even been to their branch for that matter. You do everything online or in the app.

IMO it is because so many people have a kind of sexual fetish of technophilia. They literally get off on new technology. It doesn't matter if it doesn't solve anything. It just needs to feel new and as if progress is being made. As long as it feels new and like progress the technophile will be happy to reinvent the wheel.

Even the word technophile has positive connotations as opposed to something deviant in our society. We don't even have a word for a deviant technophile , deviant over obsession with nonsense and "the next big thing".

With this attitude, nothing. I've compared it to an unregulated banking API. So for example you can launder money, do transfers that don't go through KYC, among other things.

By now you can also do things that benefit from the network effect of crypto enthusiasts, for example, you can sell JPEGs from a no-name artist for significant amounts of money, which would historically be difficult for outsider-art, regardless of the fact that you're not even selling the actual rights to the images. It also proved to be an interesting way to speculate on internet memes.

There's millions of people using this ecosystem, even if it ends up being overall net negative for the world and a temporary technological distraction, I think one should be able to neutrally assess what it's being used for. You may not like it but it's like saying a nuclear bomb has no use. You may not like what it's being used for, and it may be immoral or illegal, but to say there's no uses when clearly millions are engaging with it and doing "stuff", seems short-sighted for the purposes of discussion.

The last paragraph is what I'm trying to advance in discussions here. You put it much better though.

> Not having to speak to anyone to do it.

So it's only good for circumventing crippling social phobia? How many people suffer from those? And, hey, I've been using non-Blockchain-based online banking since around the turn of the century; can't recall when I last spoke to a bank teller, but it must have been well over a decade ago[1]. So even that use case is adequately solved without Blockchain.

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[1]: Except for buying some foreign cash before going on vacation, that may have been in 2012. Do the clerks at Forex count as bank tellers?