That's not fair. Shady folks are just getting more publicity. Noone talks about people who created stuff that works and doesn't scam people. And there's a lot of such stuff. This space is growing because of such people, despite the shady folks.
No, there isn't. It's always been nebulous talk of "potential" without any concrete uses beyond scams and criminal activity. There have just been iterations of tools for those areas. Then you have the near-religious libertarian True Believers who promote as a matter of faith, regardless of what the reality is.
This article remains ever-so-relevant:
>Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...
I suppose it might count as criminal activity, but as far as I know, it's the only way to donate to Sci Hub.
The problem for bitcoin arrived when people begun to see it as something that could be more then an underground activity and started treating it like an investment object and essentially reinvented the old failed concept of "wildcat currencies" with an intentional scarce currency, something made viable by the libertarian refusal to even look at the real world history of economics.
What we now have is a bitcoin economy thats hit a hard(intentional) limit of growth forcing people to branch away from bitcoin as the revolutionary application of blockchain in a world where some minor advances are made in actually using the underlying theory for something other then scams, creating a market ripe for new wildcat currencies pretenting to be be "what bitcoin failed to become".
The fact it's hard to not only implement correctly, but to promote to society does not mean it's not relevant.
Good things take time.
Remember that people thought for some time that general relativity and the Law of large Numbers would never have practical applications.
Full public transparency isn't that great a property of a voting system.
And it's hard to call it a "legitimate use case" before it's successful.
And come on, it's a highly experimental technology whise use cases impact the most controversial aspects of our society : money, vote, accountability, transparency, power to the masse.
Of course it's going to take time and fail in many spectacular ways.
As always with these claims (that, as noted below, have not actually been implemented and so can only be speculated on), the question isn't whether this could be done with the blockchain, but rather whether this requires the blockchain to be done.
All too often the claimed magical things the blockchain will allow can be implemented far more easily with other, existing technology. So far it's a solution in search of a problem.
Nothing wrong with that.
The fact crypto is riddle with quick money making claims and project using the blockchain for sheer buzziness tends to make skeptics extra pessimistics in their views.
It's unfair to the technology.
We have a transaction oriented temper proof distributed transparent database.
Those are objective features, and they deserve we give them a try.
"UN’s World Food Programme Builds on Ethereum Blockchain Money Transfers"
https://www.ccn.com/banks-begone-uns-world-food-programme-bu...
"The pilot alone is said to save the agency $150,000 a month while eliminating a staggering 98% of bank-related transfer fees, according to Munich WFP innovation lab chief Bernhard Kowatsch."