Blockchains and blockchain applications

In summary, my view is this:

Yes they may use blockchains to control us (including money), no blockchains are not needed to enable these plans; the cloud would have worked just fine.

So blockchains in the context of centralization and control adds no direct value over traditional cloud and clustering technology. It will be used for marketing purposes and applications will be written to enforce centralization on-top of decentralizing technology (so they have to write programs and blockchains and market them). By market I mean force people at gunpoint to use them (lol).

A centralized blockchain offers nothing over a private cloud cluster with business-2-business interfaces. So it is really just a trick. Blockchains are doing nothing to make it easier to centralize power.

The marketing for a centralized blockchain is only going to pray on naivety and affect those that are not doing their own research and are still walled off from questioning official narratives. The blockchain is generally more transparent (unless heavily encrypted) so it is easier to see its intent in contrast to a closed private cloud service. People are less and less going to tolerate closed cloud services, so they need to use blockchains to create a corruptible hybrid version (1).

Also, just like "blockchains" just saying IOT or "Smart Grid" is not enough to know if it is good or bad for freedom (2). It is important to get in to how the technology is applied. For example, Smart Grids of honest open source power meters can allow us to buy and sell fungible power on a shared power grid (break up the local power monopolies). On the other hand, it can enable something far more dangerous as James is describing in "Data is the new Oil" (3)