* Decentralized, anonymized reputation management. Imagine an ebay score that couldn't be owned by ebay, or any another company.
* Decentralized digital Asset ownership verification. Again, imagine facebook without a facebook. Or imagine purchase a music or software token that you could use on any provider, and never expired. Sign up for a new streaming service and take all your songs/videos/games with you from the old one.
* All the legal structures of a company, purchased off the shelf, handling all the vagaries of human resources and accounting, but without managers or payroll accountants. Just remote teammates, who may never have worked before, but know they will get paid a salary, receive evaluations and promotions from their peers.
These are just toy examples, I'm sure if I took more than a few seconds, I could give you much better ones. The problem with blockchain isn't finding applications - it's finding monetizable ones.
All the examples above would make amazing open source projects, but IMHO would be very difficult to generate revenue without compromising their decentralized nature, by inserting oneself into the transactions to take a cut. Centralized control of an application is almost a requirement for monetization, and, blockchains, are, by definition, intended to circumvent centralization.
Moreover, trust and verification aren't new problems, and we already have plenty of centralized solutions for these problems. So, blockchain applications both have to be better than what was there before, and work around the decentralized nature of the system.
Consequently, people trying to make a living on the blockchain mostly resort to monetizing the networks themselves - in other words, developing cryptocurrency-like products of some form. Is this decentralized? Not entirely, but it's less centralized than what came before. If people disagree with the behaviour oof the ethereum foundation, they can fork the currency. However, this still a long cry from actual decentralization. It is certainly an open question what value 'kindof-sortof' decentralized networks provide.
None of which you have listed can be proven by blockchain as it has proofs for today. All would rely on external sources of truth which entirely live outside the verification of the blockchain. The blockchain in these cases would be an immutable chain of unverified facts.
* An anonymized reputation system is the equivalent of a transaction ledger. It needs no external source, as long as the involved actors agree to enter into evaluation of each other.
* Digital assets ownership ultimately only require external sources of truth for storage of whatever digital asset they intend to provide. I concur that this would be impossibly expensive to provide via an existing blockchain implementations, without an external point of truth, but still a technically possible feat.
* An entire company on the blockchain? Sure, it's not reasonable at the moment. It was just an attempt to paint a bigger picture. The fact that it's 'not yet reasonable' is why many people are starting to try. By the time it's 'reasonable', someone will have done it.
China's social credit score is centralized and not anonymous. So, there's not really much to compare.
An decentralized credit score would have you scored by your peers. An anonymized one would only be evaluable when you chose to use it.
Could it present some heretofore unimagined dystopian situation? Sure, but the question was whether there was an application, not whether it was a good idea to build it :)
Moreover, reputation systems aren't inherently dystopian (or all encompassing like a social credit score, ftm), or we wouldn't have the long standing real-world ones.
> Decentralized, anonymized reputation management. Imagine an ebay score that couldn't be owned by ebay, or any another company
This reputation system is one application I'd really like to see in the future. It's silly that we have sepearte silos of reputation (eBay, Amazon, credit scores, etc.) that are each controlled by a company. In our increasingly global world, who would we trust to govern this system? Seems like a legitimate application for a blockchain (including consensus).
* Decentralized digital Asset ownership verification. Again, imagine facebook without a facebook. Or imagine purchase a music or software token that you could use on any provider, and never expired. Sign up for a new streaming service and take all your songs/videos/games with you from the old one.
* All the legal structures of a company, purchased off the shelf, handling all the vagaries of human resources and accounting, but without managers or payroll accountants. Just remote teammates, who may never have worked before, but know they will get paid a salary, receive evaluations and promotions from their peers.
These are just toy examples, I'm sure if I took more than a few seconds, I could give you much better ones. The problem with blockchain isn't finding applications - it's finding monetizable ones.
All the examples above would make amazing open source projects, but IMHO would be very difficult to generate revenue without compromising their decentralized nature, by inserting oneself into the transactions to take a cut. Centralized control of an application is almost a requirement for monetization, and, blockchains, are, by definition, intended to circumvent centralization.
Moreover, trust and verification aren't new problems, and we already have plenty of centralized solutions for these problems. So, blockchain applications both have to be better than what was there before, and work around the decentralized nature of the system.
Consequently, people trying to make a living on the blockchain mostly resort to monetizing the networks themselves - in other words, developing cryptocurrency-like products of some form. Is this decentralized? Not entirely, but it's less centralized than what came before. If people disagree with the behaviour oof the ethereum foundation, they can fork the currency. However, this still a long cry from actual decentralization. It is certainly an open question what value 'kindof-sortof' decentralized networks provide.