Wow, that was a rather dumb presentation. Basic arguments are like "anonymous nodes are bad because I can't sue them", "smart contracts are unneeded as we mostly just need to store static data" (supplied by authorities), "too much security is paranoid given real life trust with legal enforcement".

I believe all these would be for regular already working uses cases that people are trying to shoehorn blockchains onto.

A while ago, I talked with some guys from a blockchain technology company. They are doing mostly prototyping work for a variety of companies in different industries. However, one of the devs said that most of the problems they have been asked to solve could easily be done with a simple SQL database + logging. But since blockchain is the new, cool technology, everyone wants to be using it.

I think blockchain has a lot of potential, but I haven't seen many companies really grasp how to use it correctly.

That is quite a good vulgarization of the various properties that are at play between business cases and a blockchain; and a much better resources than OP's economist article.

I wish he talked more about properties for the currency use case -which is its most useful usage-.

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On another note, a vast majority of the targeted use cases would benefit from well engineered solutions; having redundant persistence, availability, immutability, ordering, tamper-resistance, non-repudiation. But all this is could be simply achieved with Kafka + PKI signing.

Anyway, hyperledger fabric uses Kafka internally for the ordering... which leads me to say:

If lighting candles in the dark and saying 'blockchain' 3 times is all it takes to make a VC appear and help you build good Kafka + PKI infrastructures to tackle real problems; then I'm all for maintaining this white lie based on all the wrong reasons (which would attention seeking? unspoken implicit promises of riches?).

-Just my 2 Quantum Blockchain 2.0 AI Scalable cents.