What are your reservations about blockchain? I do believe that blockchain solves this problem, and I'm also an expert in the field (seven years of research). Maybe I can move the needle for you.
You are saying it is impossible to create an improved form of crypto currency that solves scaling? Even with 10's of billions of dollars being invested this year into their development? People are throwing a lot of money at this technology. The stakes are incredibly high. If someone does find a solution and creates a form of crypto currency which can operate at scale and do so for cheap fees, they'll become at least a billionaire.
On top of becoming a billionaire, a crypto currency that was able to transact at scale, securely, for pennies in TX costs would fundamentally change the world.
No I'm not saying that at all. I'm talking about Blockchain as it currently exists and as the only real solution to decentralised digital money that we have right now.
Who cares how much money is being invested into it? I'll believe a solution when I see it. And I'll welcome it with open arms. But until then it's purely hypothetical.
The technology can improved. The money being invested into the space is an incentive and a validation for people who wish to work on improving the technology. Money attracts talent. There's also some very genuine reasons why blockchain technology can serve the greater good.
The global gold market makes something like 1 transaction per day. Global inter-bank interest rates are also on the volume of a few transactions per day.
Deep, core infrastructure (even things like BGP and DNS) don't need all that much scalability. As long as it has a use case in deep infrastructure, it can become globally relevant without scale.
But it will scale.
If it every works as a money transfer network, a store of value, or actually solves any of my other problems in more efficient way than other solutions, then I'll use it then. No need for me to speculate on it now.
This actually gets at a deeper problem in our society. Lots of people justify their unsustainable lifestyles by thinking that some day technology will make it sustainable. It doesn't work like that. When new technology happens you won't go sustainable, you'll want more.