They aren't auditing anything. Programmers/engineers don't audit budget and spending. If they were doing an audit, they would have accountants on their team, which they don't. If you bring coders/engineers into a system, it's for accessing/manipulating data/code/infrastructure. This is an enormous and unprecedented overreach.
No one takes .so seriously even after notion.so. Hell, I'm sure countless people still try .com before giving up and Googling "notion" (or maybe that's just me, but I doubt it).
We get it, you don't like crypto. You would be better off leaving the snark and sarcasm at home if you want to get your points across without sounding bitter.
Your last line completely contradicts the previous point you were trying to make-- it's clear to anyone that's paying attention that crypto economy has objectively grown beyond speculative trading and scams.
Key point: on weekends. Northeast corridor is high demand all week long. And much more of the national economy flows through that region. LA <> Vegas is mostly leisure.
A normal database isn't able to be easily disseminated by the people who need access to this data, which is enormous. Then who gets to host it? Real Estate associations are too many, too fragmented, too entrenched to agree on one or even a handful of companies with the privilege to host this information.
A blockchain (assuming you can get buy-in/critical mass from the agencies) has the ability to align some financial incentives of all interested parties to open up access to real estate listings while still holding ownership and profiting from that access.
Instead of real estate companies protecting their listing data, they could offer access to their listing data in exchange for a fee or revenue share. Instead of out-of-date listings parading as up-to-date, there's a public temporal record of updates. Instead of buyers getting restricted or partial information, they can obtain access to the listing data via alternate sources.
Agreed, this is the kind of use case blockchain excels at. I worked on a project that attempted to do something like a distributed MLS, and we had major industry leaders on board indicating a large degree of belief that blockchain could revolutionize the industry. MLS is, after all, just a legacy federated system running on inertia.
Unfortunately, it's so difficult to get a critical mass of inventory to succeed; it requires either a massive upfront investment, or partnering with RE developers from the beginning.
> it merely aims to be a new mechanism by which value is transferred, which by most objective measures it's very bad at doing.
What objective measures are you using? Over $3 Billion in value is transferred over the Bitcoin network every day. There has never been any downtime, nor has it ever been hacked, and fees are flat and transparent (just a few bucks to transfer unlimited value across the world).
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.
There's nothing absurd about a company seeking to legitimize a component of their business.
The crypto industry is not built around avoiding government rules, that's a myth propagated by its many detractors. It was born to address a failure of the banking system that hurt regular people the most.