Blockchain: Let’s think this through again

Since bitcoin came to public attention in 2009, there have been a plethora of publications extolling the significant commercial implications of both Bitcoin and Bitcoin’s underpinning technology: the Blockchain. There was a second wave of excitement generated by the “smart contract” (though I struggle to see how this differs from conditional execution of a workflow). The sheer list of “A-list” publisher have spurred some firms to invest non-trivial amounts in blockchain related use cases.