Wheels down! As your plane taxis to the gate, you pull out your phone and rustle up a ride to get you to the room that’s just around the corner from your morning meeting. Your car pulls up, and you settle into the back seat, put in your earbuds and shut out the din with your favorite tunes.

To run this common little Business Travel 101 scenario today, you’d probably be relying on iconic brands of the app economy, like Uber, AirBNB, and Spotify, most every step of the way. Sure is great to live in the future!

But what if it’s not 2015 but, say, 2025, and you could instantly find, hire and pay providers of all those services without going through a company of any kind? What if access to those services, and many more like them, came baked into the network itself, like email or a Web page, protocol-to-protocol rather than company-to-company? And what if these relationships were all managed autonomously by high-order math running on distributed computing engines, beyond the control of any one individual or organization?

The vision of such a platform-less platform has been cherished in many pockets of alt-thinking, from the “every man an island” libertarians to the anarcho-bliss communal left. It has not dominated today’s technology industry, with its ubiquitous centralized platforms competing to provide free services and then monetize them selling ads or data (or taking a transaction cut). But it has one huge win under its belt: the rise of the Internet itself, where businesses, organizations, and individuals all connect and transact business with one another directly, without asking for permission or paying a monopoly-holder or begging for approval from an app-store manager.

Once considered forbiddingly abstruse and impossible for mere mortals to navigate, the Internet took off once it translated its complexities into the friendlier terms of the domain-name system and the World Wide Web. The network we use and enjoy today achieved its scope and fertility by giving participants more freedom, more choices, and more human variety than any of its closed-off predecessors — once-dominant businesses like AOL and Compuserve that had to adapt or wither away.

Now, a new wave of visionary technologists is betting that we can do the same thing all over again — this time, turning the admittedly complex mechanisms that make the digital currency Bitcoin work into a friendlier system that can fetch you a ride and book you a room while playing you some personalized music. The key to all of their dreams is called the blockchain. Today, it enables Bitcoin; tomorrow, it could be running your life.

A blockchain is a cryptographically protected shared database — a public ledger or journal that anyone (with the right skills and tools) can contribute to. Once information is entered on a blockchain, anyone can inspect it, and it’s nearly impossible to alter it. The most widely used blockchain today is the one that tracks Bitcoin transactions and keeps each unit of currency from being illicitly duplicated. That’s called “solving the double-spend problem,” and the blockchain, though not infallible, is a particularly elegant and effective technique. But there’s no reason that blockchains couldn’t be used for all kinds of other purposes — any situation that calls for an open public record where everyone can keep extending it into the future but no one can tamper with its past: think intellectual property rights, personal identity verification, real estate records, and so on.

Today there’s no shortage of startups, projects, and developers trying to apply the blockchain concept to everything. More than anything else, that’s because it gives the tech industry another bite at a long-coveted apple: decentralization.

“The core functionality of Bitcoin was creating a currency and accounting system that people could trust without recourse to a centralized intermediary like the Federal Reserve,” explains Rachel O’Dwyer, a core member of the P2P Foundation and lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin who studies this field. The blockchain provides “a distributed system for collaborating with others that we don’t know or trust, for sharing knowledge, for making decisions, for developing transparent systems and so on.”

For as long as there have been computer networks, there have been people telling us that such networks will “disintermediate” companies and institutions and connect individuals directly instead. And forsooth! A whole lot of disintermediation has even really happened. But every time a little decentralization gets underway, an equal and opposite reaction kicks in — you could call it “directorization.” The digital innovators of our day, like those Portlandia hipsters with their birds, have a universal scheme for improving anything: “Put a directory on it!”

In a sense, the directorization impulse is understandable. Sure, you can empower individuals to do all kinds of amazing things in a peer-to-peer style, but they still have to locate one another, right? “Discovery,” as the industry calls it, is hard. Uber is still finding its drivers on Craigslist.

Someone has to keep track of who is where and help you find what you want. So each time people start peer-to-peering, somebody comes along and sets out to make everything easier by building a catalogue or index. Think Yahoo circa 1995, or Google circa 2000. Bittorrent is a file-sharing technique that requires no central platform, but we keep getting a Pirate Bay and a PopcornTime anyway, because they’re really convenient.

At heart, each of today’s platforms — Uber, Kickstarter, Airbnb, and the rest — is just a glorified listing service, enhanced with some combination of real-time connections, trust-building systems, and transaction-easing tools. These services provide a helpful starting point for anyone who wants to find a ride or a room. Once you’ve put a directory on something, you’ve also created a nice business opportunity — and a magnet to pull the scattered particles on the network back toward a nucleus.

The blockchain, both as code and as concept, is enabling us, finally, to see just how far decentralization can be pushed. Can we share data so that no one can directorize it? Is it possible to decentralize a service all the way, so that the center is just, poof!, gone? We know that before long Uber is going to use software (i.e., self-driving systems) to make its drivers obsolete; can software turn around and make Uber itself obsolete? Is there a decentralization event-horizon beyond which platforms simply dissolve, and we all float out together into the great soup of being and connecting?

Any reasonable answer to these questions has to be: Not yet. Not for a long time. But a person can dream, no?

Here are two instances of that dream.

Last year Backchannel, where you’re reading this now, published a piece by D.A. Wallach suggesting that the blockchain gave the music industry an opportunity to rebuild from the ground up: Digital music files could be authenticated using a Bitcoin-style approach, their rights information could travel with them, and you could even build in an automated pay-the-owner system. Micropayments without annoying digital-rights-management restrictions! Cool — but it wasn’t as if you could just download an app and start in.

A British music entrepreneur named Phil Barry — he’d worked with Radiohead singer Thom Yorke on a Bittorrent-driven release of a solo album last year — read Wallach’s article and, like a lot of people, thought, this is either going to revitalize the music biz or seal its doom. He didn’t care either way all that much; he was more interested in how tech could improve the lot of artists themselves, and he knew he wanted to explore what it would take to actually implement the kind of system Wallach had outlined.

“Quite rapidly,” Barry recalls, “this went from being an obscure, out-there idea to something that was being talked about seriously.” He began working with Consensys, a sort of incubator for projects based on Ethereum — the best-known and probably furthest-along, technically speaking, of the platforms that are trying to apply Bitcoin-style tech to broader uses beyond currency. Barry called his project Ujo Music. (Ujo, he explains, is “container” in Esperanto.)

Around the same time, singer-songwriter Imogen Heap, who has long had a sideline in music tech, began talking publicly about her concept of a blockchain-based music rights-and-credits system called Mycelia. “She had described in a very creative, artistic sense, something that was very similar to what we wanted to do from a functional sense, a practical sense,” Barry says. The two talked, and when Heap released a song called “Tiny Human” in September in a variety of digital formats, one of those was a prototype of Barry’s Ujo Music system. As Barry puts it, when people bought this download, “they could see that the money has been sent to the right people.”