I feel like a lot of the use cases listed here (which, to be fair, were often touted in 2019) misunderstands what blockchains are actually useful for, which is the ability to index information without a third party. Instead, they conflate digital objects with physical objects... which obviously leads to nonsensical business models. So, I think the author is rightly picking out the things that don't make sense, but is missing the forest for the trees.

> 1. Supply chain management

I don't really know enough about supply chain management to go one way or another on this, but I suspect it could be more useful as a realtime marketplace for goods than as a source of truth whether a certain even happened. I think the author is right that verifying events is largely an IoT issue. But maybe there's some value in having the assurance that "A says X event happened" as opposed to "X event conclusively happened".

> 2. Object authenticity guarantee

I always thought this was stupid as it relates to physical objects. Again, the author rightly notes that this is more of an IoT issue. But I think the value proposition is much clearer for digital objects such as NFTs. Whether or not NFTs are inherently stupid is a different discussion, but it's pretty clear that you get very strong authenticity guarantees with them.

> 3. Statement authenticity guarantee

As noted, you don't need a blockchain to make the guarantee. That's just cryptography. But if you want to timestamp it or the ability to revoke it, then a blockchain would be more useful. I'm sure a lot of authenticity guarantees could be managed by decentralized databases, but I can see some value to putting them on chain if you want to allow the guarantees to interop with other applications.

> 4. Voting

It really depends what you're voting on. In many cases simply collecting digital signatures is fine. Again, that's just cryptography, not blockchain. But if you want flexible realtime governance to a system with complex voting rules, then smart contracts could be a good way to manage that. As noted, this isn't suitable for private votes, but there might be some ways to pull it off with ZK proofs.

> 5. Proof of authorship

My point here is more or less the same as with 2.

> 6. Land registry

Really, the use case here is "deeds and ownership registries of other financial assets". I don't think there's anything wrong with the enforcer having special permissions over the asset. The use case here isn't " protecting you against the fraudulent activities of both the regulatory authorities and any individual officials". The asset only has meaning in the context of a larger institution, so it doesn't make sense to try to strip it form that institution. I think the real use case here is more that you can interop your asset with other onchain applications. Additionally, it allows you to pick and choose which specific permissions belong which parties. Everything doesn't automatically default to whoever is running the infrastructure

> 7. Interbank transfers

I don't buy the premise that banks would necessarily need to defer to a private chain in order to obfuscate payments. Applications like Tornado Cash exist and ZK technology has come a long way since 2019. But even if they did, I don't think "setting up a distributed database and resolving any disputes in court" is a great outcome. I think there's value to having the system settle (and avoid) disputes automatically without having to wait for things to be resolved in court.

> 8. Token for token’s sake

Sure. I think memecoins are stupid, but I have a hard time seeing them working outside of a blockchain.

> Blockchain as a trigger

Having worked at an enterprise blockchain company where most of the clients were using blockchains as a trigger, I can say that this is almost always a bad idea. For most use cases, blockchains are a straight up bad fit, and would lead to a worse application.

> Money

I actually think that bitcoin is terrible money, but I can see blockchain-based payment systems using stablecoins taking off.

> Smart contracts

I think there is definitely a lot of unexplored territory here, partially because a lot of the product development in the crypto space is driven by idiots. But you can't tell me that there are no use cases globally decentralized, censorship-resistant, general purpose computation. If nothing else I think there were a lot of ideas thrown around several years ago that weren't possible due to scaling issues, which are now possible due to L2s (ex. disintermediating online marketplaces like uber + airbnb, social media with sovereign identity, gaming state + asset management).