Do You Know Some More Things That Really Don’t Need Blockchain???

Bemoaning gratuitous appropriation of blockchain isn’t anything new; this publication and many others have been bemoaning its brand-jacking for months. Since PR companies don’t seem to have taken the hint, it behooves us to name and shame some of the more egregious cases, in the hope that others take the hint. We’ll start with Our Music Festival. The event, scheduled for San Francisco on October 20, will be “the first-ever blockchain powered festival. we learn that “Blockchain technology allows for the greatest degree of customization instead of that one-size fits all coupon on Groupon. The digital ledger allows companies to look at what a customer buys often and offer deeper discounts on those products. So basically, consumers get the discounts they actually want, not ones that just make them shrug their shoulders. Replace ‘Blockchain’ with ‘Distributed Database’
A simple means of telling whether a product needs blockchain is to replace the word with ‘distributed database’. For example, “Hashed PKI certificates stored on a distributed database” works. “Distributed database-powered festival,” on the other hand, does not. If any good comes of the enduring bear market, it will hopefully be the loss of blockchain as a superfluous prefix for products. If it takes another 12 months of bleeding crypto markets to weed out the blockchain impostors, we’ll take it.

What are the most ridiculous appropriations of blockchain that you’ve encountered? Let me know in the comments.