The Rise of Whatever

I think there's a decent chance that folks on the fringes find interesting uses for immutable and programmable distributed ledgers, even if the prevailing culture of crypto is hellish.

I keep hearing this theory, that “eventually” we will find the use cases for distributed ledgers, and I don’t buy it. Bitcoin was invented at roughly the same time as the iPhone, and the iPhone immediately found use cases. Right away the global economy reoriented itself around the smartphone, because it demonstrated real value to actual people. We did not need to wait and twiddle our fingers for years going “I think there’s a decent chance people find interesting uses for this someday”.

Immutable distributed ledgers, by contrast, have found no use cases other than crime and financial speculation in coming up on twenty years. Exactly how long do we have to wait for these interesting uses that are “surely” coming?