Just as an example of how crypto can help solve some problems in this arena see VideoCoin's proof system: (https://medium.com/videocoin/proof-system-for-videoco

Just as an example of how crypto can help solve some problems in this arena see VideoCoin's proof system: (https://medium.com/videocoin/proof-system-for-videocoin-storage-mining-4c8f8b79bb90 https://medium.com/videocoin/proof-system-for-videocoin-stor... and https://medium.com/videocoin/proof-of-transcoding-as-a-new-consensus-mechanism-ca9ccf3fa168 https://medium.com/videocoin/proof-of-transcoding-as-a-new-c...) They are attempting to decentralize and distribute video encode/delivery, and a big piece of that is a poof of work implementation to incentivize and reward reliable nodes. Just one example, but there are others, and a lot of progress has been made to reduce the strain caused by throwing crypto into something that fundamentally needs to be very fast and lightweight to be usable. Edit: Corrected duplicate links