When I was at Code for America in 2015, somebody dropped by one of our events to buttonhole me about [jazz hands] blockchain for governments. I listened politely for a while and then asked, "Why would something that is definitionally a central authority need a trustless, distributed system?" They blathered and huffed for a while, but could never answer the question. They walked away thinking I was clearly not bright enough to see how it was all going to change.

A couple years later a friend asked me to set down with somebody who wanted to launch a startup. Their customers were companies who wanted employees to be able to safely report sexual harassment and other misbehavior. They had a few existing competitors, so I asked what made this new company different. The would-be founder explained that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain. I asked further, and it turned out that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain internally. So basically a database with extra steps. I pointed out that assault reporters wouldn't be able to see any difference; from the user perspective, all the companies in the market were just saying, "trust us, we definitely won't tell the people paying us anything". The entrepreneur was convinced that it really was different, but if so they couldn't make it clear to me.

So now we've had, what, 6 or 7 years where [jazz hands] blockchain was going to revolutionize things and it hasn't made a practical dent in any real industry. Originally I too was willing to call that naive, but it seems an awfully long time to accidentally maintain such perfect innocence.