I'm really surprised by how uneducated most of HN are about blockchain. This means we're still early. Few big things that are coming out of blockchain;

1) ICO - a way to raise money in a distributed manner outside the traditional financial system (think Banks and VCs).

2) Defi - a way to borrow and lend (and much more) outside the traditional financial system. One example, Banks get as much as 16-20% return on your depoiste -- you might see 1% of that. Defi solves that by removing the Bank and you can capture all of that yield. You can lend literally with a click of a button and see returns with every mined block. Take the money back any time you want.

3) Governance - there is a big social benefit if we figure out all the edge cases and the correct implementation. Many benefits in voting, real-world governance, and open source (what to work on next, what gets funding).

4) Many many Comp. Sci. and Cryptology advances; see byzantine general problem, zero-knowledge proof, and many more. Just one example of a company doing lots of research: https://iohk.io/en/research/library/