More than 4 billion people don’t, and even those of us who do, should probably use our non-corrupt climate to implement these anti-corruption use cases while our political leadership isn’t corrupt. I mean, even if we never turn to corruption it’s infinitely easier to implement when you don’t need it.

Aside from that private sectors like container shipping desperately need a secure and global way to authenticate container ownership. Shipping the piece of paper that will let you pick up a container at a dock is currently more expensive than shipping the container itself, because anyone with that paper can steal your stuff.

Or what about making sure consumers know that they are actually buying your brand and not a copy?

That being said, most of those use cases won’t be decentralized. Maersk isn’t going to utilize public nodes, they’ll run their own.

Once you drop those constraints, the door opens for all kinds of applications that would be too slow or complex to execute on government infrastructure.

For example, I could configure my vehicle to keep track of pothole locations, and then every time it swerved to avoid one I put 25 cents worth of cryptocurrency into a wallet with an associated smart contract that says: this money goes to anybody who fixed the pothole.

Later, somebody fixes it and notifies the smart contract of their claim against my reward.

Next time I'm near that pothole, my vehicle either inspects is or prompts me to, and if it seems fixed, the fixer gets the money.

Without smart contracts it's difficult for the would-be fixer to know that the promised money even exists, and to be sure I'll actually deliver.

Now maybe the app above needs to be tweaked to include somebody who is a trusted pot-hole inspector who goes around doing the inspections (in exchange for a cut). Maybe that trust comes from the fact that they wrote the app in the first place.

The point is, you can have apps that make decisions in a way that can't be tampered with. Want to withdraw your pothole donation? Too bad, the contract is the only software that can move funds out of that wallet. The only way to unlock them is to find somebody to fix the pothole.

That's something that would be difficult to ensure without a smart contract.

In centralized server (server in AWS), the gate keeper can tamper the voting records (UPDATE voting set your_champion_voting = 100).

With smart contracts on top of Ethereum, that is impossible.