If you could tell me even one application of this technology outside of cryptocurrency, I'd genuinely be interested.
* Decentralized digital Asset ownership verification. Again, imagine facebook without a facebook. Or imagine purchase a music or software token that you could use on any provider, and never expired. Sign up for a new streaming service and take all your songs/videos/games with you from the old one.
* All the legal structures of a company, purchased off the shelf, handling all the vagaries of human resources and accounting, but without managers or payroll accountants. Just remote teammates, who may never have worked before, but know they will get paid a salary, receive evaluations and promotions from their peers.
These are just toy examples, I'm sure if I took more than a few seconds, I could give you much better ones. The problem with blockchain isn't finding applications - it's finding monetizable ones.
All the examples above would make amazing open source projects, but IMHO would be very difficult to generate revenue without compromising their decentralized nature, by inserting oneself into the transactions to take a cut. Centralized control of an application is almost a requirement for monetization, and, blockchains, are, by definition, intended to circumvent centralization.
Moreover, trust and verification aren't new problems, and we already have plenty of centralized solutions for these problems. So, blockchain applications both have to be better than what was there before, and work around the decentralized nature of the system.
Consequently, people trying to make a living on the blockchain mostly resort to monetizing the networks themselves - in other words, developing cryptocurrency-like products of some form. Is this decentralized? Not entirely, but it's less centralized than what came before. If people disagree with the behaviour oof the ethereum foundation, they can fork the currency. However, this still a long cry from actual decentralization. It is certainly an open question what value 'kindof-sortof' decentralized networks provide.
This reputation system is one application I'd really like to see in the future. It's silly that we have sepearte silos of reputation (eBay, Amazon, credit scores, etc.) that are each controlled by a company. In our increasingly global world, who would we trust to govern this system? Seems like a legitimate application for a blockchain (including consensus).
There are about 500 articles every week about China's "social credit score" dystopia, and you want to put that on the block chain?
An decentralized credit score would have you scored by your peers. An anonymized one would only be evaluable when you chose to use it.
Could it present some heretofore unimagined dystopian situation? Sure, but the question was whether there was an application, not whether it was a good idea to build it :)
Moreover, reputation systems aren't inherently dystopian (or all encompassing like a social credit score, ftm), or we wouldn't have the long standing real-world ones.
* Digital assets ownership ultimately only require external sources of truth for storage of whatever digital asset they intend to provide. I concur that this would be impossibly expensive to provide via an existing blockchain implementations, without an external point of truth, but still a technically possible feat.
* An entire company on the blockchain? Sure, it's not reasonable at the moment. It was just an attempt to paint a bigger picture. The fact that it's 'not yet reasonable' is why many people are starting to try. By the time it's 'reasonable', someone will have done it.
Don't really see what's hand-wavy about your parent comment tbh, the link you posted doesn't seem to address common scenarios like 51% attacks or even why our current system is flawed. The only tangible thing I can find in there is that they don't like trusting verisign - which is fine but really a weird narrative to demonstrate why the world needs that particular implementation.
In the link that was posted, a pollution of a distributed root zone will vitiate the entire Internet's DNS. That is the vulnerability, and there are many attacks that will achieve that for the link that was posted.
Beyond that, some games are using public blockchains to track ownership of game items.
For example, property records. Right now there are considerable checks and balances needed to ensure there aren't funny things going on with the books when they are locked away at night.
This isn't as pressing an issue in the US, but it is a massive problem worldwide. Central governments in some countries want to be able to track property without the record keepers stealing it.
I don't think we'll see this widespread for the next 20-30 years. But imagine when existing power structures have absorbed this tech and they can then sell it - like VISA selling a block chain property registry to countries where the money is auto transferred in local currency from one end user to another while communicating to the countries central bank... maybe with tie in to bio metrics for ID and transaction verification and automatic tax payments.
Hardly a disruption from existing nation state and corporate power structures, but definitively a disruption in the possibilities of what can be offered.