I agree that decentralizing the transactions of stocks, bonds and mortgages may have advantages. I guess I'm just slightly annoyed by the meme that "currency is only the first app of blockchain technology." What needs to eventually be understood by the media is that:
(1) Currency is the foundational application of blockchain technology; without a valuable currency, no other apps are possible.
(2) The native blockchain units (bitcoins) are the only asset with no counterparty risk.
It's possible to make the latter arbitrarily small, but there's no technological solution to the former as it's inherent to the problem space.
Yes, well said. We need to stress the distinction between trust of the ledger system and trust of the counterparty (and then point out that bitcoin is fundamentally different as it has no counterparty [or perhaps the counterparty is the ledger system itself]).
Justus, I see you're giving a talk via telepresence in Vancouver on Thursday. What will you be speaking about?
Other uses of blockchain technology (and not the bitcoin blockchain, it is easy to construct blockchains with less security) is where the good is only information, for example the right to access a theater (a ticket). You can show up at the entrance with a ticket "coin" (a better word needs to be invented) and send the ticket to the ticket office for admission. It could be done with an association of theaters where each theater runs a miner, and no block reward is necessary.
I fail to see why you would need a blockchain for that though... Any centralized server model could do.