My honest opinion on blockchains:
They have only shown enough clear evidence to feasibly solve 3 things:
1) Hard money
2) Decentralized IDs/DPKI
3) Timestamps
Almost every other use case is mired in oracle, scale, and/or physics problems that range from hard to near-impossible
Essential texts for beginners to understand why Bitcoin matters:
1. Shelling Out (Szabo)
2. Money, Blockchains, Social Scalability (Szabo)
3. The Bitcoin Standard (Ammous)
4. The Bullish Case for Bitcoin (Boyapati)
5. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (Nakamoto)