The problem with crypto is that the main unique features are only "distributed trust" or the "public immutable ledger" aspects. Everything else can be implemented or emulated much more easily emulated with simpler, traditional technologies.<p>The <i>thing is</i>, nobody actually cares if the thing they trust is distributed or not. They just want to not have to trust some <i>specific</i> third parties. They <i>very rarely</i> want their information to be public and immutable.<p>For example, banks would really like to be able to detect credit card fraud where customers use a cc from bank A to pay off the cc debt in bank B. But they don't want to trust <i>each other</i>, so how do they exchange this data?<p>Crypto people would instantly jump and say: "Blockchain!"<p>But what's required here is not <i>distributed</i> ledgers, and certainly not <i>public</i> ledgers. The whole problem is thank bank A doesn't want to give B their customer records. Making it public is <i>worse</i>.<p>Instead what they do is hire a third-party that's <i>not a bank</i>, like Equifax, Experian, and the like.<p>These companies hold the ledger centrally, <i>secretly</i>, and don't tell anyone[1] the contents, including bank A or B! Instead, they sell back to the banks the "cc fraud analysis" <i>only</i>, after having done the cross-bank transaction analysis.<p>There are hundreds, if not thousands of companies like this around the world. I know of several that collect sales information from competing companies and then sell back the anonymized statistics to them. There's basically one for every industry, in every large country.<p>About 90% of what crypto does can be implemented much more sanely, cheaply, and privately using something like a cloud service.<p>For example, Azure SQL now has a "Ledger" feature where it keeps cryptographic hashes of transactions in a chain (sound familiar?), and keeps these in <i>immutable</i> blob storage. This blob storage can be restricted to specific private networks. Even if it is public, there is access control based on API keys and the like.<p>Corporations that need an immutable ledger that "none of them control but all of them can access and verify" can just hire a third-party to spin one of these up and host it in the cloud. Faster, cheaper, simpler, compatible with ordinary SQL applications, and <i>private</i>. That last one can't be underestimated. That's a <i>killer feature</i> that no blockchain can provide without crypto wizardry that only 2 or 3 people on the planet understand.<p>Ref: <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/security/ledger/ledger-overview?view=sql-server-ver16" rel="nofollow">https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/se...</a><p>[1] Have you ever wondered why the Equifax data breach affected the records of <i>so many</i> people from so many banks? This is why! Their core business model is cross-bank data collection and analysis.