Your response here, and a lot of the supportive responses to it, highlight what I find so aggravating about the crypto/blockchain community: no explicit, discrete examples, just a lot of hand wavy "oh, it takes a lot of work but when it comes you'll know it!!" wishful thinking. Top that off with the common (you aren't doing this BTW but I see it all over HN) "See how the HN hivemind just hates crypto!" whenever sceptics ask for explicit, unambiguous details on the utility of the technology.
I'll play devil's advocate, because I do actually think there is one place blockchain could be useful: as a backend settlement layer for financial institutions. If you ever get into things like banking or credit cards, you'll find that our current settlement technology is kind of insane - it's basically a digitization of paper file driven processes from 70 years ago. Things like big clearing houses are largely necessary as a result of these processes, and I could see blockchain obviating some of that.
Even then, though, it takes blockchain from being this "changing the world technology" to a relatively minor efficiency improvement. I also still wouldn't bet on it, because even though the existing system is complicated and crazy, it still works, and it's not totally clear to me that existing players have enough incentives to actually change the system.
There's been a few examples of use cases said by others in this thread, and your financial settlement use case is a great one. Any time you need to move money around multiple parties based on a clear set of rules or criteria, blockchain could be useful. Insurance claims, international remittances, lending, to name a few. Anywhere a valuable process is still dominated by paper (and there are surprisingly many).
Generally, being able to program the management of money (i.e. if personA meets a certain criteria, send $X to personA) in a transparent system can be incredibly powerful.
I'll play devil's advocate, because I do actually think there is one place blockchain could be useful: as a backend settlement layer for financial institutions. If you ever get into things like banking or credit cards, you'll find that our current settlement technology is kind of insane - it's basically a digitization of paper file driven processes from 70 years ago. Things like big clearing houses are largely necessary as a result of these processes, and I could see blockchain obviating some of that.
Even then, though, it takes blockchain from being this "changing the world technology" to a relatively minor efficiency improvement. I also still wouldn't bet on it, because even though the existing system is complicated and crazy, it still works, and it's not totally clear to me that existing players have enough incentives to actually change the system.