In the beginning there was BitCoin.

This enabled a Peer-to-Peer distributed ledger of transaction data secured by cryptography to create a brand new, immutable store of value. Relatively swift transactions without intermediaries or authoritative figures taking their cut or suppressing transfers of wealth between borders has already created a new standard in asset fungibility.

Trading Magic Internet Money - Now What?

Not long after Bitcoin established these decentralized concepts into the minds of the masses, it became clear that there is much more data that can find enhanced utility through distributed ledger technology, or blockchain.
What data benefits through this level of public transparency and consensus?
Digital agreements, governance mechanisms, financial instruments, supplychain traceability, data indexing, digital identity, and so much more.
It's alot of work to even consider these ideas, let alone PROPERLY deploy them out into the world. In its infancy there are SmartContracts on the Ethereum blockchain (and others) which are immutable digital agreements on-chain that can serve the purpose of creating tokens/currencies with unique properties, holding collateral for lending, staking assets for accruing interest, or verifying that the terms of the code are met before preforming some action.

ICO's and Decentralized Finance

Unique token economics and financial tools unconfined by bureaucracy, tradition, and boundaries of the physical world have unlocked currently unfathomable value in this new cyber world largely surpassing that of the "DotCom Boom". Hot projects blasting to the moon with x100 profits, high interest incentivized lending, and participation in development through governance mechanisms and opensource code have established a new frontier, or a "wild west" depending on how you look at it.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution #4IR

Digital agreements still have a long way to go; being that they're immutable and public, SmartContracts can only access other data that is on the chain, but what about real world event triggers and confidential data?
The next steps in the direction of bringing upon this new age civilization are in scaling, oracles, and interoperability.
For the time being, some of these operations are on the "slow" side or cost fees for operation cost on the network, the less of an encumbrance these become, the more we can ultimately accomplish.

Decentralized Oracles are self contained systems that can find accurate consensus of high quality data to be passed to a digital agreement from offchain. ie - product temperature, price feeds, weather statistics

Most of the blockchains operating today are not meant to communicate to one another or offchain easily, in the coming years this limitation will dissipate much like the original ARPANET being segregated networks growing into the Internet we know today and beyond.

These concepts will bring levels of transparency and technological advancements needed to take the next leap in sophistication in our society through near instant finality transactions, digital sovereignty, and even robotics as a service.

Blockchain, Decentralized Finance, and The Fourth Industrial Revolution