The last few years cryptocurrency have gained a lot of traction. Its pioneer, bitcoin is reaching a market capitalization that is getting closer to the 100 billion mark. Furthermore, institutional investments are becoming more prevalent and while some countries have a very negative stance against cryptocurrency in general it seems like many countries want to regulate and innovate with it.
On the back of bitcoin, countless and countless of cryptocurrencies have been created, many clones without use cases or the required security to be viewed as a secure asset and a few that have some distinguishing features. You have Dash for micropayments, Monero and Zcash for complete anonymity and so on and so forth.
One of the more popular cryptocurrencies that gained notoriety is Ethereum. This is because it tries to do more than be a decentralized payment protocol. It attempts to decentralize other industries by allowing code into the transactions which only happen if certain conditions are met, so-called Smart Contracts. A simple analogy, would be a vending machine, you throw in a couple of euros and only if you have met the required amount of money, you get your drink, if not it gets returned to you. In essence, this is what Ethereum is.
On top of the Ethereum protocol, many different initiatives are being created, not in the least because people throw money at these ideas like there is no tomorrow. You can not open a cryptocurrency news source without seeing the word bubble written somewhere, often more than once. This doesn’t mean that everything that is being built upon the Ethereum protocol (which are called ERC20 tokens) is useless. Below I will list three industries that could benefit from having no trusted party and full decentralization.
The first one is storage applications, different entities in the cryptocurrency industry are attempting to solve storage applications by making them decentralized. No more taking down of megaupload or losing your files in the cloud because a certain company goes bankrupt. Furthermore can storage solutions create great incentives since many different individuals have more than enough storage space left on their devices which you can rent in many of these applications. Several groups who are working on this are FileCoin, SiaCoin and Storj and no doubt many more in the future. This is a real use case where decentralization can work.
Another industry that would fair by decentralization is online gambling. There are many different companies that will commit fraud, go bankrupt, not pay out because of opaque reasons and so on to find online. This can is currently already being solved by decentralized gambling outlets. Etheroll (DICE) provides a decentralized casino build upon the Ethereum protocol with a provably fair game where you can gamble with your Eth. Other examples are Edgeless and FunFair who are also trying to develop several diferent games. Regulation concerning these protocols could be a problem that needs to be addressed eventually but it eventually could render online casinos with unfair practices and higher consumer costs obsolete.
I encourage you to look further into Ethereum and its possibilities of creating decentralized applications, commonly called dApps. Several issues need to be addressed to really get mainstream adoption of which scalabilities issues is one of the biggest ones. However, in my opinion it is an exciting and new technology that could disrupt several industries pretty severely. Which ones is obviously the question, only time will tell!
References:
Coinmarketcap (2017). Cryptocurrency Market Capitalizations. [online] Available at: https://coinmarketcap.com/ [Accessed 23 October 2017]
D’Anconio, F. (2017). Is Blockchain Technology Really the Answer to Decentralized Storage? [online] Available at: https://cointelegraph.com/news/is-blockchain-technology-really-the-answer-to-decentralized-storage
Davies, J. (2017). How blockchain is decentralizing gambling. [online] Available at: https://www.techinasia.com/talk/blockchain-decentralizing-gambling [Accessed 23 October 2017]
Github Ethereum (2017). Ethereums White Paper. [online] Available at: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper [Accessed 23 October 2017]
