1. People being able to manage their own universal identity instead of using "Sign in with Facebook"

2. Transparent financial markets on arbitrary derivates (like etherdelta.com)

3. Eventually, people authoring and managing their own content, instead of acting as free labor to generate advertising revenue for Twitter/Facebook/etc

1. https://milagro.apache.org/

2. SEC & IRS will be a roadblock there, eventually.

3. I don't see why blockchain is necessary for that.

I fail to see why ethereum would be the only & best solution here for those cases. I just don't see anything special about it, at best its an unscalable and insecure medium given what we've seen in the past with DAO (now starting another one!) and subsequent editing of blockchain ledger (effectively signaling distributed consensus is not possible with profiteering mixed in).

Milagro is basically a poorly thought out copy of a federated blockchain system. I can't take it seriously as a technology, sorry.