When I first read Satoshi's paper [1], I read it as a solution to the Two Generals' Problem [2]. The problem concerns itself with multiple parties coördinating and communicating over an untrusted channel.
The blockchain got distracted by finance. Modern settlement and clearing is efficient. It's perhaps the most efficient part of the financial system; it is certainly the easiest to upgrade. The difficult stuff, the messy institutional knowledge, customs and tendencies, are unaffected by protocol choice. That's why the same behaviors which plagued the unregulated banking system plague cryptocurrency markets today. People are still people.
There are many systems which require a trusted group of people to reach a consensus in public. (Libor is an example [1]. Notaries appear, prima facie, to be in a similar category.) Immutability is of dubious benefit. But a simple, public consensus mechanism beats checking sundry private APIs and blog posts (how a lot of this is done today). Unfortunately, this class of use cases is negated by a "currency-like" token value.
The blockchain got distracted by finance. Modern settlement and clearing is efficient. It's perhaps the most efficient part of the financial system; it is certainly the easiest to upgrade. The difficult stuff, the messy institutional knowledge, customs and tendencies, are unaffected by protocol choice. That's why the same behaviors which plagued the unregulated banking system plague cryptocurrency markets today. People are still people.
There are many systems which require a trusted group of people to reach a consensus in public. (Libor is an example [1]. Notaries appear, prima facie, to be in a similar category.) Immutability is of dubious benefit. But a simple, public consensus mechanism beats checking sundry private APIs and blog posts (how a lot of this is done today). Unfortunately, this class of use cases is negated by a "currency-like" token value.
[1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem
[3] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/libor.asp