Why the blockchain?

Unless you just woke up from prolonged hibernation under Artic ice crust, you cannot miss the hype around blockchains and their related coins. If you are new to cryptocurrencies and blockchains, let me give you the simple bird view on that: speculation on cryptocurrencies is currently very high, but whether it is a bubble or not, bursting soon or never, is not really relevant. The important part, shadowed by the coins market hype, is that the blockchain technologies are a new infrastructure that should help solve many issues we have. It is a missing piece that we need in order to rebalance the modern Internet landscape, and bring back the decentralization that was once promised in the early Internet days.