There is no question that right now block chain is very hot and overhyped. ICO Have become the new fundraising tool and very often are being used to raise money simply to develop an application that will supposedly reward the initial participants with future profits.

However there are still some ICO which I believe truly exploit the benefits of blockchain, those are the ones were decentralization is actually important and where a specific token is required to operate on a marketplace.

The main issue with software but also with any kind of data is that it can easily be copied. Piracy has always been a big issue. BTC and all the digital assets that followed managed to create a type of “data” that cannot be copied by using the principle of the distributed ledger. There is however another type of data which cannot easily be copied (or at least it would lose value significantly if copied) and it is data that is streamed live and for which the time when it’s received or the element of interactivity has significant value.

Receiving the price of a stock last year has no value, you need the data real-time.

So how does this combine with blockchain? First of all distributing a stream of data requires a certain degree of organization and infrastructure. It also requires just like any business a certain degree of overhead (managing payments, customer service, etc.) which to some extent acts like a barrier of entry reducing the permissionlessness of the operation.

Let’s look for example at traders, trading is a very hot topic especially in the world of crypto currencies. Everyone is trying to make money trading. Most people however have no clue and no experience and would benefit more by trading based on someone else’s experience. The problem is that a good trader is just that, it doesn’t mean he is able to manage a business, create his website, market the website, collect payments, manage customer service, etc.

Now what if there was a place where this trader could send his trading signals real-time knowing that people can receive the signals live as long as they pay the desired fee? Everything is automated, the trader only has to send the signals, everything is taken care of and he just receives the money.

Or let’s take the example of a more borderline industry, porn. Porn has moved from pictures to videos that could be downloaded to live streams which happens real-time. The middleman however takes a very large amount of the profits, mostly because the performer has no way to operate independently. You need the visibility of a well-known website, their payment processing abilities, customer service, etc. With a system like streamr the performer will simply have to get listed on the marketplace, start streaming and wait for payments to be collected. This could apply to any form of communication which happens real-time. A “communicator” would simply have to communicate something and solely based on the quality of its product regardless of his abilities to run a business he would be able to profit from it.

This could apply to amateur TV channels, radio channels, etc. It is of course a bold experiment and potentially a big paradigm shift which assumes that at some point people will expect higher quality long tail content to be available to them and would be willing to pay for it rather than have it financed by advertising.

The number of applications is very large, and what I described is mostly the tip of the iceberg. Let’s go back to the example of trading signals. Let’s imagine now that the people that are going to buy the trading signals don’t want to actually stay awake 24 7 in order to execute them manually but rather automate the process by connecting the live trading signals directly to their exchange platform.

This of course can already be done by API, the problem with API is that each one of them is different. It would be a big barrier of entry for a trader to develop an infrastructure which will allow him to interact with the API of all the known exchanges.

A platform like streamr instead can be an open platform for data exchange that will unify the protocols. All that needs to be done is for the trader to send his trading signals to streamr and the customers could simply connect their trading platform to the data stream of their choice. This will not only automate payments but also standardize interfaces. Being completely permission less will ensure no discrimination would be possible and anyone would be able to stream the data they want.

I think this is where the real value is, in machine to machine communications. Anytime you need to integrate different applications it’s always a difficult task mostly because every single time you have to adapt to a new API. What we are talking about here is almost an API marketplace standardized under a single protocol which also allow for automated payments.