It may not be the absolute most useless, but it's awfully niche. You can use it to transfer money if you live somewhere with a crap banking system. And it's very useful for certain kinds of crime. And that's about it, after almost two decades. Plenty of other possibilities have been proposed and attempted, but nothing has actually stuck. (Remember NFTs? That was an amusing few weeks.) The technology is interesting and cool, but that's different from being useful. LLM chatbots are already way more generally useful than that and they're only three years old.
Gambling! That's actually the number one use case by far. Far beyond eg buying illicit substances. Regular money is much better for that.
Matt Levine (of Money Stuff fame) came up with another use case in a corporate setting: in many companies, especially banks, their systems are fragmented and full of technical debt. As a CEO it's hard to get workers and shareholders excited about a database cleanup. But for a time, it was easy to get people fired up about blockchain. Well, and the first thing you have to do before you can put all your data on the blockchain, is get all your data into common formats.
Thus the exciting but useless blockchain can provide motivational cover for the useful but dull sounding database cleanup.
(Feel free to be as cynical as you want to be about this.)
This is so true, from 2018-2021 my internal banking product was able to use blockchain hype to clean up a lot of our database schema. Our CTO was rubber stamping everything with the words blockchain and our customers were beating down the door to throw money at it.
Well that's hilarious. I wonder if LLMs might have a similar use case. I fear they tend to do the opposite: why clean up data when the computer can pretend to understand any crap you throw at it?
