Some people have mentioned this before but I forgot who they were: The blockchain is very likely to disrupt the financial sector, specifically the whole industry which is now in place for settlement&#x2F;clearing when transferring financial contracts (shares, bonds, CDS, etc). A unified API and single public ledger could really bring costs down for those transactions and that&#x27;s what a lot of financial institutions are interested in. I don&#x27;t think it will have much value as a reserve currency, especially since it relies on computational power (so the amount of control is mostly based on economics - ie. the availability of cheap electricity and APUs) rather than political power.