Yeah but now instead of organizing around a local division of the Maersk company and their software to validate operations - relying on trust that they'll handle things correctly on their end - the locals could just use a blockchain app with zero organization and zero people to trust beyond the protocol itself. Granted that's not needed, as Maersk is apparently doing a fine job now, but if that ever changes - it's there as a backbone, and it's unlikely to be replaced except by a better protocol. This just lowered the need for organization and cut out a middleman (Maersk) saving money on the whole process (at least once the protocol market has churned for a bit and settled into a nice boring reliable one around for a few years / decades, charging only the bare computation costs - which is hopefully/predictably the future of all crypto tech... boring and cheap as shit).

I have little trust in cryptocurrency beyond "people like hype markets", but a global consensus layer is an obvious step with many applications for whittling down every process to its barebones - with some guarantees at a protocol level that the savings aren't going to anyone in particular. This doesn't need to do anything new, it doesn't need to do anything flashy. It just needs to slowly devour every existing business and reduce them to essentially open source software, uncontrolled by any middlemen or power brokers, accessible by anyone for pennies. And it probably will!

This is such a perfect example of a pro-blockchain answer in that it's entirely based in fantasy.

The blockchain hype cycle peaked nearly five years ago: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=b...

There were many pilot projects that soaked up vast sums of money. But in reply to a comment saying I haven't been able to find any practical results, what do I get? No practical results, just the same sci-fi guff.

Again though, you shouldn't be expecting practical results already. The short term hype soaking up vast sums of money is just an overreaction to a technology that will still take many years to develop proficient programmer/user experiences and public trust before it sees real use. Being skeptical of every current project claiming they'll be the ones left standing a decade from now is only smart - it's a giant hype market built on dreams. But you shouldn't be so doubtful that a relatively-uncontrollable internet consensus layer won't be built upon with some interesting results down the line. And that has clearly been created, and proven with decent security already.

I absolutely should be expecting practical results, because most of the people trying to apply this technology are promising practical results. If blockchain proponents were just saying, "Hey, we're fucking around with some tech to see what happens," I wouldn't have any complaints. But that's not where we are. Instead, it's billions of dollars of investment.

Is it possible that there will be "a relatively-uncontrollable internet consensus layer won't be built upon with some interesting results down the line"? Sure. Lots of things are possible. But it's also very possible that after another decade of Bitcoin, et al, we'll still have just a bunch of stuff that's not adding at all to the world beyond a playground for scammers and some tooling for light financial crime.

Sometimes a small and ugly technology turns out to be the Internet. But most of the time, it's just a bit of garbage that never went anywhere.