This comment by @grayruby got me thinking:
Almost everything relating to blockchain, tokenization, stablecoins is being built on private blockchains by companies with way more inertia, financial and political power so their "the world will move on chain" thesis might be somewhat right but their stupid coins aren't going to profit from it.
Why are people building "private blockchains"? The whole reason for the blockchain apparatus was that Satoshi was solving the trust issues in decentralized money. If you're gonna just run a private, centralized service, there isn't any need for it. Isn't a "private blockchain" an oxymoron?
Then, I came up with a theory. I'm sure it's not new, and someone has written about it somewhere else, but it's new to me and so I thought I'd share it.
And the theory is: investors all have a certain identity that they're tied up with. "I'm a dividend investor." "I'm a venture capitalist". And, of course, "I'm a crypto investor."
So part of the answer is, there's money sloshing around amidst a class of people who self identify as "crypto investors". Within the world of crypto investors, there are two types:
(A) Those who actually understand the technology and the reason for it
(B) Those that don't
The problem is, the investors in class (B) still have capital to deploy. So a grift forms around them in which people market buzzwords like "blockchain" and "defi" to them, and they invest their capital with them, nevermind that none of it really made sense in the first place.
It would also explain why Tradfi companies also market into these buzzwords. It's not because they actually believe in any of it, or have even thought too deeply about it. All they know is that there is capital waiting in the wings which is self-identified as crypto capital... and all they're doing is going after that pot of money with whatever nonsense sales pitch they can muster.
QED
This has been utter bs ever since Vitalik started pitching that the goal of ETH was to have the entire internet on a blockchain. No matter how you formulate it, there is no reason to. And if you like LN, then you're liking something that is specifically designed to be off-chain.
It is in most cases. However, hash-chaining and batchwise aggregation is something you can find, to name an example you know, in
gittoo. The base chaining concept isn't all that different from what is used in Bitcoin.We know that there are use-cases for a bare hash-chains-of-batched-data concept that don't need to be public while still being a good decentralized solution. I've used the principle in the past for multi-party low-volume, medium urgency data distribution that needed to be precise and non-repudiable.
I do agree with you that whenever someone advertises their solution as
private blockchain, they are most likely just marketing some sloppy solution to a non-existing problem.My less well-reasoned answer is that it's advertising.
This reminds me of a point Doug Casey made about bull markets in gold: even unrelated companies that just happen to have "gold" in their name go up.