What are blockchains being used for in 2020

Question

I've been getting further and further into researching blockchains, and how the entire ecosystem works, and works together as an ecosystem. However it all just seems to be about trading cryptocurrencies either from fiat or other cryptocurrencies, and there are some small things out there like gambling and basic games, but I still don't see any useful stuff for normal day to day stuff.Getting away from the building blocks, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, smartcontracts etc. What are things like Chainlink, Cosmos, etc. really enabling us to do today? I found Orchid on coinbase, but there seems to have been little movement past its initial hype. It would be great to have a blockchain that can do anon VPN service, but doesn't seem there today.

AlexITC · Accepted Answer

About what's being built, look into the https://identity.foundation, there you will find about decentralized identities, where you have a wide amount of use cases, like verifiable credentials, and authentication.
Particularly, I'm involved in a similar project involving decentralized identities and verifiable credentials, and we just released an app to showcase how everything works: https://atalaprism.io/
Another use case where I know someone working on it relates to auctions for cars being sold by insurance companies, the problem is that external people is bribing employees from the insurance companies to win the auctions, the goal is to remove this possibility by using smart contracts.
On the previous case, it's a common problem on public auctions conducted by the government and I would love if they use a system where auctions could be audited by anyone, so that participants trust that no one is cheating.

alexmingoia · Answer

The purpose of Bitcoin is to have a fixed-supply digital asset that can be used as money, and which has no central authority to inflate the supply or censor transactions.
Bitcoin is not a building block to a blockchain. The purpose of a blockchain data-structure is to ensure the monotonicity/order of transactions in a distributed decentralized context such as the bitcoin protocol. A blockchain is just a list of transactions where each one references the previous one.
Orchid is a VPN network where participants are paid to route traffic with an Ethereum token. I don’t see any advantage to this over just paying a VPN provider directly. It does make VPN chaining easier, but you can still do VPN chaining without Orchid.

thinkingemote · Answer

>but I still don't see any useful stuff for normal day to day stuff.
I don't think there are any, but what you will find is a lot of enthusiasm for the potential of it. Such hype also help sells various crypto currencies or raise funding for startups, but might not be the same thing.
It's hard to separate the enthusiasm for the pure technology and persuasive opportunism to make a quick buck. It has been around a decade now so the core tech should be less on the edge.
I would suggest that the lack of actual normal day to day stuff indicates something important.

giantg2 · Answer

Document or transaction records. For example, stock trading or bank transfer records in clearing houses. I think someone is working on blockchain to have a transparent and immutable record of public documents, like laws and regulations.