... infrastructure apps like AD/Exchange and the blockchain. So if you have a 50,000 user org that requires 50 Exchange servers and 400 TB's of disk for mailbox storage, you can reduce that drastically by somehow utilizing the blockchain...
I doubt that a blockchain is a good storage system. The blockchain is good for decentralized, censorship resistant distributed systems using very little data (see the blocksize discussions, not only in bitcoin).
Off topic (from crypto space): Microsoft also understood, that AD is not future proof anymore. It became to complicated to manage (aka too expensive in the companies). And the problem with huge exchange servers and disks stems from the fact, that an email to a group is replicated n times - it doesn’t scale very well. I remember when Lotus Notes had placed links to the attachment in each users profile, and as such a 5Meg attachment was only stored once on the mail server, instead of a thousand times. There are many discussions about data de-duplication. Hash values play an important role. This concept also adopts to backup systems...
Now on use cases: initially the blockchain was intended to spend money over the Internet. It became a successful ecosystem, with notary services and last recently crypto kitties game. So there is a certain flexibility to allow for new use cases, and I encourage you to go into the next steps. We are just at the beginning of a new data age.
On distributed storage: there is Siacoin and storj as concepts, trying to build the basis for future crypto storage systems. Maybe this is an approach for your thoughts?
