This is a clever article, but I’m confident it won’t age well.
I don’t think there is a shortage of applications as much as there is a high amount of friction involved in rolling things out. It’s difficult to motivate institutions to use crypto when consumers are not yet aware of the benefits. And it’s equally hard to relay those benefits to consumers when there aren’t enough existing products/services to warrant the steep learning curve.
While you’ve provided an example of smart contracts done wrong, it doesn’t seem like you are giving the concept a fair shake. Having the ability to invest or contribute to something in a secure and frictionless way is powerful.
It’s basically kickstarter without the middle man. One could buy shares, tokens, or certificates of ownership in something anonymously or in a publicly visible way. And while you make an interesting point that the specifics may be open to discussion or debate, the stake or status of ownership is clear.
Another example is disrupting centralized trust. Imagine you went to the DMV and they said, “sorry our mutable centralized database says you do not own your car. It’s listed as stolen.” What recourse do you have? What kind of mess will you need to go through to prove that you really own the vehicle?
More interestingly, if you wanted to trade your vehicle with someone else, you would need to go back to a central authority to update the records of ownership for both — during set hours of operation, and perhaps at significant cost. With crypto, you could literally just trade on the spot with zero need for a central authority to be trusted to manage those records.
Later you could use private keys to prove to any legal entity that you in fact own the vehicle. And while we will probably want to see more refinement of this concept (perhaps crypto co-signed by a relative or associate of both the buyer and seller for added authenticity of major transactions), it’s not hard to imagine how this is infintely better than a mutable central ledger with limited hours of accessibility and all sorts of security risks.
