Couldn't even tell the difference between brokerage and prime brokerage until I corrected it - yikes, I found that pretty annoying. I needed to correct him on something so basic and context-less.
> unless you're saying that all these applications require a zero-trust source of truth.
Not all of them, of course. It's not a wonder child that aims to solve all of humanity's problems. It'll bring humanity closer, though and make it more efficient in many ways. People always try to look so narrow at it.
There are plenty of use cases and attributes (permissionlessness, immutability, zero-trust sources, etc.), and of course, not always all of these count all the time or are even desired. But it allows us to have and apply those as needed in an interoperable way.
It is hard to comprehend what it'd mean to have the world connected via distributed ledgers that provide transparency and would be able to automate a lot of what we do to a much higher degree.
We're not running in circles.
> Businesses aren't built around this technology because it's not advantageous to use it in a legally compliant environment.
This is just one of the reasons. The technology is also not scalable and abstracted enough yet. No one is pretending anything here.
I just gave some examples. Tech is early, and the businesses around this new environment still have to be built. It's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem.
But this is only because businesses have yet to be built around this technology. These things will change. We are super early. We should not build these use cases everyone is asking for right now. The tech is still early and has to figure out many things. There is a lot of innovation happening on the base- and interoperability level, and it needs a lot more abstraction (e.g., network and account abstraction) to make things more usable.
Standardization also plays a huge role, and yes, in many ways, it's a technological chicken-and-egg problem whereby systems have to work with each other and the chain in a way that makes intermediaries as obsolete as possible.
The transfer speed of money or the general transaction speed - well, that's something that is being solved as we speak. These systems (e.g. Ethereum) have to mature, and many ways are being explored, using known principles like separation of concerns, e.g., separating settlement, execution, and data layers - but in a decentralized manner.
The public and many entrepreneurs need to understand how early this tech is and rush use cases that don't add value as of now. You must go deep and understand that this has to grow from the bottom up.
* Insurances (e.g. your travel insurance) are contracts. They should be digital, standardized, on a public ledger, so that I can travel anywhere and prove that I have one instead of having to bring, a fakeable piece of paper.
* If I resell my phone, transfering the remaining guarantee and/or insurance should be nothing else then a transaction. On the blockchain that's 10x more efficient than the status quo.
* If an artist sells his art the first time for $10, and the person resells it for 10000$, then the artist should be compensated too. Royalty mechanisms can solve for that and avoid secondary markets or at least create a more beneficial secondary.
There are an endless amount of examples which will make a lot of things more efficient, transparent and enforce standardization on a global level. Long way to go, but absolutely worth it.