I worked for several years on an 'enterprise blockchain' system. We often called it distributed ledger technology because our platform didn't actually use chains of blocks or proof of work, and it didn't have a token or anything like that. It was essentially a type of database but it had a lot of ideas from Bitcoin in it and was blockchainy enough that customers accepted it as such.
I have to admit, at the very start I was skeptical about why so many large companies seemed to want this stuff. Like Tim, I also spent a lot of time talking to staff at these large institutions to understand where they were coming from. Unlike him I didn't work for AWS which is pretty much the exemplar of centralised infrastructure, so maybe it was easier to pick up on some of the more subtle issues involved.
There are a few things to understand about businesses that decided they wanted blockchain:
1. They have complicated inter-firm communication and synchronization needs.
2. They solve those needs today via creating centralized trusted intermediaries (like CLS). This comes with a world of pain and problems like the obvious "too big to fail" issue that was exposed in 2008, but there's also a lot of less obvious problems, like these institutions immediately becoming stagnant rent seekers who don't innovate.
3. They exist in markets that lack obviously dominant players who can push things forward. Many people in the tech world don't understand this because we rely so heavily on a handful of ultra-profitable, ultra-huge tech firms that spend lots of treasure on giving out freebies and standards setting, but that's abnormal.
So they heard about how Bitcoin can synchronize different companies view of a real financial object like a ledger without a SWIFT-like organization sitting in the middle, and thought "yes that sounds like what we need". And they're kind of right, as long as you think in terms of business problems rather than technology!
"Blockchain" is a concept that works for them speaking in the purely abstract social sense because it acts as a neutral rallying point. If one company in a market observes that maybe having a giant specialized too-big-to-fail clearing house like CLS isn't the ideal way to solve atomic transactions, and they go to their partners saying "hey let's use this cool thing we designed" the answer will always be no because their partners will say, why should we empower our competitor? Blockchain as a concept is owned by nobody, and the core idea is that it empowers nobody, so it acted as an enabler for conversations that would otherwise never have happened. Whether the final result actually uses proof of work or even has blocks at all actually isn't so relevant except in the sense that business owners don't want to get ripped off by people lying to them about what they built.
Tim Bray should really understand this dynamic better than most people because he created XML, which crops up in the enterprise space all over the place, often in ways that aren't really appropriate. Something like protobufs would have been a far better fit but they use XML. Why is that? Well, XML went through a massive hype wave ~20 years ago thanks to the W3C relentlessly pushing this vapourware "semantic web" concept, so for a brief period XML was the future of everything. Again, this created a socially acceptable rallying point at which complex inter-firm business problems could be solved in a relatively decentralized way. The tech got used regardless of merit simply because it was something everyone could agree on and unlike ASN.1 the protocols/tooling was free.
Back to blockchain. The platform I designed for this use case (Corda) was a competitor of the DA platform used in ASX and has done relatively well in the market - it reached number 1 by number of projects using it and unlike the ASX case actually has real deployments that are actually decentralized. Over 90% of Italian banks are using it for inter-bank reconciliation! [1] There are other projects that use it too which seem to be working (I'm not involved in any of them directly and haven't worked on Corda for several years now). You never hear about them on HN because they're too Starship Enterprise to be interesting to the crowd here, but the idea that there are no working blockchain projects isn't actually true.
We managed this partly by walking the tightrope between what people said they wanted (blockchain!) and what they were telling us they actually wanted in customer interviews (what we came to call distributed ledger technology). There was definitely a fair bit of overlap but not enough to just throw Ethereum at a problem and call it solved. What they really needed was a combination of better inter-firm messaging, signing/cryptography, atomic financial transactions without a CLS-style intermediary that actually takes custody of the assets, a robust identity framework, good developer support and training materials etc. Some of this can be found in blockchain related research like BFT algos, others were somewhat solved already, but blending them together into a coherent platform was hard.
There's lots more that can be said about this - some customer projects failed, but the reasons ran the gamut from tech to social/political/business reasons. It wasn't as simple as "blockchain is a scam", which is what Bray seems trying to imply here. There actually is a there, there. It's just really, really hard to solve these problems without a hype wave to coordinate and synchronize intent.