"The Future of the Web Looks a Lot Like Bitcoin"

I would have dismissed this piece as simplisme but for the fact of where it is published.
I had to force myself from "this is oversimplified" to "what am I missing?".
From the brainiacs at IEEE Spectrum, July 1, 2015:

Forget the currency; it’s the protocol behind it that matters. It will mutate and take over everything we do (or could one day do) on the Web. You’ve been warned

To most of the world, Joseph Lubin is a leading thinker in the ever-expanding realm of digital currencies. To me, he was the counterparty in my first Bitcoin exchange and a man with a knack for saying the biggest things in the most level and unassuming of tones.

It was winter of 2014 when he beckoned me to a Bitcoin conference in Miami to tell me about a new project, named Ethereum, that he and a group of like-minded Canadians had begun working on just a few months earlier. When I caught up with him, he didn’t hold back on the scope of his vision: “We will replace insurance companies. We will replace Wall Street,” he told me.

Then the list kept growing. Online movie distribution houses like Netflix and Hulu. Gaming platforms like Xbox and Sega Genesis. Messaging services like Twitter. Add to that retirement plans, currency exchanges, voting, intellectual-property managers, and trust-fund disbursers. According to Lubin, everything—really everything—we do on the Internet or via any kind of digital channel is about to undergo a radical change.

The idea he described to me is one that has since gotten a lot of attention from digital-currency enthusiasts. It is the theory that the same technology that secures transactions on the Bitcoin network—and thereby renders them transparent, nearly instantaneous, censorship-resistant, and free of the need to trust anybody—can be used to process other, more complex financial negotiations and to securely store any kind of digital information on the Internet.

Over the past year, this theory has been playing out in a very splintered, disorganized fashion. Among the applications that already exist are a distributed domain-name registry, a digital notary that requires no third-party verification, and services that manage financial contracts through decentralized escrow accounts.

Some of these experiments are taking place on the Bitcoin network. Other projects, like Ethereum, have started as entirely new networks or are now piggybacking on some of the so-called altcoins—clones and the near kin of Bitcoin. Many of the ventures are now backed by substantial investments. This January, for instance, Spark Capital and the Israeli venture-capital firm Aleph funded such a Bitcoin 2.0 startup called Colu, with US $2.5 million.

At meet-ups and more formal gatherings, there is a palpable feeling that the possibilities are endless and that money is only the first, and perhaps the most boring, application enabled by Bitcoin technology....MUCH MORE

There is a second reason to take the writer seriously. His Twitter avatar is an image we are familiar with:

First seen hereabouts in 2009, we featured it in a 2012 post, "They're Young... They're in love... They eat Lard":

As one of the few analyst blogs that covers* the grease/tallow/lard complex we attempt to stay au courant with the latest developments.

Sometimes though it is a good idea to pull back for a look at the longer view. Here's lard, ca 1950**:...MORE

So, I'm sold.
Except for someone saying:

Such enthusiasm should not, however, be confused with the current industry vogue of rubbishing bitcoin whilst simultaneously claiming that the blockchain technology is genius.
We are less sanguine on the latter front....

I wonder if we can get one of them quantum 'puters Google and NASA are testing.
And then just hack the blockchain as tminus7 suggested in the comments.