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A few publicized blockchain applications have been identified, although they are far from the promised world-shaking disruptions of the status quo. Walmart and other food retailers say they will use blockchain to track the sourcing of lettuce, chickens and other fresh produce, for example.

Otherwise, it remains mired in the kind of problems described by U.K. blockchain skeptic David Gerard in his book “Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain.” In an email note, Gerard told me “I am intensely envious of McKinsey naming the problem so clearly. They really hit the nail on the head here. The Digital Transformation Agency in Australia said the same thing: ‘For every use of blockchain you would consider today, there’s a better technology.’”

Boosters insist “it’s definitely coming in six months or next year. Just keep giving us money!” Gerard scoffs. “Everyone says it’ll be great in the future, or it won’t work in their own industry but it might work in someone else’s — but there’s zero evidence of it working in any industry.”

I asked Matt Higginson, one of the authors of the report and a McKinsey partner in New York, about any blowback from the blockchain-booster cult. “At the individual level, there has been barely any negative feedback but a ton of positive feedback for the honesty and candor of the tone — saying what others have been afraid to say in public (after so much investment),” he wrote in an email (the parentheses are his). I asked Higginson to what degree his assessment represents a permanent reduction in expectations — as opposed to a tempering of timelines where blockchain eventually achieves all its expectations, only slower. He said that “in their current manifestation, the blockchain protocols which currently exist offer little benefit over existing technologies for MOST applications, and further, focusing on the technology of the solution (misses) the greatest obstacle to solving some of the more persistent problems in different industries.”