Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

I call BS on this. What application can replace people with logic attached to blockchain that also can't do the same with a simple database and code? (And I mean people doing useful work, not bureaucracy which hasn't been automated with macros yet) Blockchain is just a very slow database with distributed consensus. Apart from pure value transfer, what's the use case here where it's actually necessary?

Youtube taking a large percentage has nothing to do with the nature of the technology and everything to do with the fact that they have no competition due to insane network effects and highly optimized research driven UX. Also hosting, indexing, and reliably streaming hundreds of TB of high quality video is not a trivial problem. Further, you cannot escape censorship when your concern is advertising revenue.

> What if we could build app stores that don't take a 30-50% cut.

Once again, this is not a technology problem: Google and Apple will never allow app store competitors on their platform, otherwise someone would have already done this (and it was done during the early iPhone days with the Cydia store available only by breaking Apple's security - no blockchain required)

> What about getting paid for things that are impossible right now because of CC tx fees?

The same problem exists with bitcoin tx fees such that all the proposed solutions to this problem involve finding a way to avoid the blockchain at all costs.

> This unlocks microtransactions & an entire attention economy (see yours.org, steemit.com, more incoming)

Microtransactions are not practical on the blockchain and most microtransaction concepts are DOA because nobody except crypto-enthusiast wants to pay 10 cents to upvote memes and cat pictures when they can do that for free, with a better selection, on sites like reddit. There is probably some limited potential for microtransactions when it comes to gaming or maybe publishing content, but once again, the real problem has very little to do with technology and much more to do with the fact that most content is crap and people don't want to pay for it.

> How about p2p digital rights management to allow artists to keep more of their income

Once again, not a tech problem. People would happily pay the artist if the artist self-published, but most don't do that because publishing through a platform or another distributor is the only practical option for discoverability. Once you're discovered, the payment aspect is a non-issue, e.g. famous artists who already deploy "pay what you want" style stores (Radiohead, Louis CK, Humble Bundle etc).

> How about any service that exists to keep records? I would love to see the day Pacer was replaced by a blockchain

Why? What problem does this solve? Storing records is already a solved problem. There are plenty of non-blockchain techniques for storing, auditing, and cryptographically verifying and securing records without any of the PoW drawbacks. Please offer even one practical example.

> What if a kind of reddit could exist without centrally moderated channels and armies of fake users

First of all, the blockchain does not solve the "fake user" problem, so I'm not sure what that means, but centralized moderation is not a problem for most people who just want to browse content and don't really care if someone gets banned for spamming "nigger" in comments. For those that really care about totally unbridled free-speech there are already non-blockchain alternatives like voat.co... what does a blockchain bring to the table?

> What if p2p rented data storage could be a fraction of the price of dropbox without selling your data

Economics of scale guarantees you'll never be able to beat a centralized solution like AWS when it comes to this type of thing. You might see some cheaper options for a time, but once the market catches up to the fact that AWS is achieving orders of magnitude cheaper storage than a faux meshnet of consumer harddrives, you'll find that this idea is totally impractical.

> What if network/VPN rules could be tokenized in the hardware and network access could be metered and charged per minute in crypto

Interesting idea, but nobody wants this.

> What if you could receive payroll as a minute by minute stream

Interesting idea, but there's no reason that employers would adopt this.

> What if the lottery was provably fair and 1000 times less of a ripoff

Not really a concern for those that operate the lottery.

> What if we could replace obviously flawed political polling with prediction markets

Vague, impractical and fraught with its own flaws.

> I could write this list all day.

Yes, but like 99% of blockchain related ideas, the problems that are actually solved are already solved without the insane drawbacks of PoW.

Then your understanding is wrong. It's document timestamping system, dragging along all that data is just a side effect of an implementation detail.

At any rate, the advantage of Bitcoin/Ether is that sending Joe Schmoe your money doesn't mean you've exposed your credit card number and billing address (likely also your physical address) to Joe Schmoe. So there's pros and cons to either system. Refunds have existed since well before credit cards were a thing. Does it require a bit more of "buyer beware" ideology? Sure, but I don't think that's any different than a cash-based society.