Decentralization is a concept that unifies the world of cryptocurrencies, and developers have been keen to adopt the principles of decentralization to various industries. So the question becomes, which industries are most prone to be disrupted by decentralization?
4.) Storage
Decentralized storage makes a whole lot of sense, and the benefits are very clear: reliability, privacy, verifiability, and of course, a cheap price point, are key factors that would propel a decentralized storage service over any currently existing centralized cloud storage services. Sia, Storj, and MadeSafe are all competing in this area, and all are developing revolutionary storage techniques that will almost certainly provided a better service than what even Amazon can offer.
3.) Gambling
One of the very first services that spawned out of the birth of bitcoin was gambling. In comparison with the highly regulated world of fiat gambling, users found the unregulated wild west of cryptocurrency based gambling too fun to resist. Crypto gambling services offer transparent and provably fair gaming, and their house edges are often significantly lower than their "real world" counterparts. And for those who understand the concept of expected value, many crypto gambling sites like Safedice and Crypto-games offer users an option to "bet on the house", and thus provide a mathematically sound avenue for investors to make money.
2.) General Banking
With the still recent 2008 market crash and subsequent banking crisis in mind, cryptocurrencies offer this promise: you will never lose your coins in any sort of centralized crisis. In addition to safeguarding their userbase against any outsider threat, many cryptocurrencies have developed additional benefits thanks to the wonders of decentralization. Low-fee remittances, instant transactions, and impermeability are among the chief arguments in favor of cryptocurrency based banking. Whether you intend to use bitcoin to store your value, or new services like Ripple and Stellar to quickly send money around the globe, decentralized cryptos intend to improve the general banking experience.
1.) Supercomputing
Back when bitcoin first hit $1,000, one of the chief aspects that its users loved boasting about was the security of the network due to the immense computational power (hashrate) backing the currency. Fast forward to today, and newer projects such as Ethereum and Golem are attempting to turn this computing power into doing more than just security. By harnessing the power of mining to do general computation, it is quite possible for crypto networks to develop more computing power than could ever be assembled in a single centralized location.
Thanks for the post, I would add land rights, digital media rights and remittances
Those are interesting ideas that I generally agree with, with the exception of land rights. All the industries I provided above do not rely upon any outside force to allow operations. Land rights, in contrast, would require government backing to secure. Blockchain technology would be able to prove who owns the land, sure; but to actually enforce the law and kick out those who do not belong on your land, there needs to be outside intervention.
It would be great if the government would get behind blockchain technology when it comes to land transfer, but I don't think that will happen for the foreseeable future.
Absolutely, with everything in life, if it is deemed illegal by a government you can lose it. In the US citizens could not own gold bullion between 1933 and 1974.
I'd say auditing is goint to get disrupted as well. Decentralization will make it harder to audit certain processes and the auditors will need to get used to the digitalization of their audit trails. Great post, you just earned yourself another follower!