At our Bitcoin startup, we spend a lot of time kicking the proverbial tires on interesting Bitcoin applications for the near future, and theorizing what our world might look like through the lens of ubiquitous cryptocurrency.

Some of these ideas are odd, some of them are crazy, and quite a few of them could significantly change the way we live our lives. Better still, all of them are possible given the right circumstances and a healthy amount of furtherance.

Salaries as Granular as Salt

Although salt is no longer used as a medium for wages, many societies like these salt workers in Gujarat, India, still derive their livelihood from it

Because it costs next to nothing to transmit funds through its network, Bitcoin theoretically allows us to be as granular as we want with the way we earn money. As granular, in fact, as the salt from which “salary” got its name.

Want to do an automated end-of-day payroll for all your staff every day of the workweek? No problem. How about by-the-hour payouts for lawyers, doctors, or freelance web designers? Maybe an instant, per-call payment to customer support staff, or an immediate cash deposit to a blog contributor as soon their article is posted online?

In our traditional work environments, we account for the days and hours spent by each employee at their respective desk, but we’re not able to release funds more often than once or twice a month because it’s just too resource-intensive. Leveraging programmable money allows us to work around the physical limitations of accountants and HR personnel, avoid the muddy waters of corporate bureaucracy, and removes the time constraints brought about by banks and other financial institutions.

Bitwage.co is one of the first Bitcoin payroll solutions and aims to collapse the current bank-transfer-based systems into a single, streamlined hop

Employers benefit because they pay only for the output that they receive, and employees benefit because they know exactly how much they’ve made at any given moment. On both sides, opportunities for optimisation brought about by granularity abound.

Proof of Like

What is the value of a Facebook Like, or a Twitter RT? Is a Tumblr repost more valuable than an Instagram favorite, and by how much? Social media marketers obsess over these questions on a daily basis, and the honest answer is “it all depends.”

Bitcoin could completely overhaul both social media marketing and online advertising by incorporating cash payments directly into that all-important social sharing button.

Imagine if each time you hit the Like button on Facebook, a tiny amount of BTC flowed from your wallet into the wallet of the content author. You’ve just shown tangible financial support for someone whose work you ostensibly appreciate, and that is significantly more meaningful than just indicating to your social graph that you liked it (which is often of nebulous utility).

ChangeTip.com refers to itself as a “love button for the Internet” and hopes to end the culture of clickbait.

This system has the side effect of incentivising people to only hit the Like button on content they really like, which implies that the overall quality of recommendations will increase as well. Imagine applying this strategy on a website like Reddit with its hundreds of thousands of voracious readers.

This provides professional content creators with an alternative revenue channel, and reduces their long-standing dependence on advertisers and sponsors.

Spam is Dead, Long Live Bacn

Even with all of our fancy inbox heuristics, spam still accounts for about 80% of all emails sent within the ASEAN region. Unsolicited email is prevalent because there’s no real penalty imposed on the sender — the cost difference between sending a hundred spam emails and a million spam emails is essentially nil, so spammers go all-out, every single time.

If every penis-enlargement email cost 1 satoshi to send, the spam industry would collapse overnight

How would an email prove that it wasn’t spam, and that it was either bacn or an otherwise legitimate message?

The Bitcoin solution would be to add a small fee for each email sent by anyone, anywhere. The fee itself would be microscopic, maybe 1/100th of a US cent, such that not even power users would feel it. The only people that would feel it would be those that are sending hundreds of millions of emails a day, i.e., spammers or unscrupulous marketing folks. (Also, maybe Google and Apple, but I doubt they’d mind.)

If we can get the cost structure right, spam, Trojans, and phishing emails would disappear overnight. The challenge, of course, lies in getting the whole Internet to agree to this pay-per-mail system, which might prove to be impossible. Still, it might be worth it to have a “clean email” network where all messages are paid for, and leave the choice up to the individual users.

For Every Juan, a Hotspot

Facebook’s magnanimous Internet.org aside, major advances in bringing the Internet to disadvantaged societies are few and far between. The problem is that these initiatives tend to be spearheaded by large centralised organizations, and shouldering the costs of mass Internet connectivity is a difficult thing to scale and sustain in the long-term.

At last month’s Angelhack here in Manila, the standout product was an app that allowed any Android phone to act as an ad-hoc, pay-to-use wifi hotspot. People who had the spare bandwidth could share their connection with anyone else in the immediate vicinity, and earn a few pesos at the same time. These are the kind of tiny transactions that the Bitcoin protocol excels at, with micropayments triggered regularly until the user disconnects from the hotspot.

Turning your neighborhood convenience store into an Internet hotspot would be as simple as buying a mass market smartphone and prepaying for a month’s data plan.

The beauty of it is that the financial agreement between the provider and the customer occurs at the moment the connection is opened. This agreement is renewed at short intervals, with each interval affecting a small payout. In this manner, you could turn hundreds of thousands of small convenience stores all over the Philippine countryside into on-demand Internet hotspots, and it’ll be sustainable for as long as the micropayments in aggregate equal the cost of your average unlimited data plan for a given month (about $25 in the Philippines).

Proof Positive

There are thousands of different ways you could apply cryptocurrencies to existing industries and either improve them drastically or upend them completely. This is the kind of futurism that excites us the most — the notion that one technology applied well could do so many different things for so many different people.

The best part is that none of these innovations will come from a single organisation or authority, because everyone has equal access to all the necessary tools. We’re on the precipice of a truly decentralised revolution, and the future does indeed look bright.