I have read quite a bit on blockchain / cryptocurrencies and can’t say I ever understood what all the fuss is about.  I have joked that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have all the disadvantages of a credit card combined with all the disadvantages of cash.    I believe the original goal (like PayPal) was to make a new payment system.  Lots of the claims and directions the technology has taken since then seem … unusual, at least to me.  A good write up from The Verge:

‘BLOCKCHAIN’ IS MEANINGLESS

One quote I liked:

“‘Private blockchain’ is just a confusing name for a shared database,” wrote Arvind Narayanan, an assistant computer science professor at Princeton who co-teaches a popular blockchain class on Coursera.