We already know blockchain's killer apps

Economists have long day-dreamed about problems that could be solved by market mechanisms. The laboratory has been opened, and by simply issuing a coin and a few rules, you are free to run your own cryptoeconomic experiment.

I argue there are four killer apps for blockchains:

-Dark web and black market payments: a payments layer for those who require anonymity and censorship-resistance.

The second form of tokenization, asset tokenization, is the process of taking a traditionally illiquid asset and transforming it into fungible shares on a blockchain. Those shares can be traded on a trustless marketplace to enable their liquidity.

-Payments (macro and micro): So long as cryptocurrencies require their users to have impeccable key management, blockchains can’t solve the peer-to-peer payments problem. Parallel to this, many economies are making big leaps forward in the ease of traditional payments. Look at Venmo in the U.S., M-Pesa in Africa, or AliPay and WeChat Pay in China. ... See more

Vitalik Buterin, argues that crypto won’t have a killer app at all. I disagree.

In both adoption and ease of use, cryptocurrencies are far behind the traditional banking system. But there are two use cases where cryptocurrencies are far ahead: international payments and micropayments.

A blockchain solves these problems. If you issue your assets as a token on a blockchain to begin with, then you inherit an enormous shared infrastructure for managing and maintaining markets.

-Tokenization: Protocol tokens, such as Filecoin, serve as an intra-protocol incentive scheme. By calibrating the incentives and how they align with the token, you can create a protocol just like BitTorrent where instead of merely hoping users do the right thing, you pay them to do the right thing. And instead of hoping users aren’t assholes, you c... See more