How might cryptocurrencies change the future of publishing?

I can answer only from the payments perspective.

It hasn’t so far. Publishing was the one area everyone predicted that would change. Tipping for reading articles would become the norm. It would be easier to pay pennies all across rather than $9.99 payment walls, etc.

None of that utopian dream ever transpired to reality.

Many came and tried, but almost little or not tractions for publishers & authors.

Whilst, decentralized in nature, no one in their right mind is going to find your crypto-address for your-token-of-choice and then send you money. It just doesn’t work this way.

We haven’t reach (for whatever reasons) as simple as a single click and voila! Payment sent. This might be achieved via a browser extension, and using an advanced, yet-to-come version of MetaMask and we might be able to make payments, the same way we upvote or like something on Facebook.

No more merchant accounts, no more complicated setups, simple code base or plug-ins one can use - think of it as the OAuth of the publisher payments industry.

We are still quite a ways from it - reason? The cryptocurrency world itself is like the Internet circa 1991 - very command line and terminal-ish. The UI/UX needs to go through a seris of evolutionary phases before it is ready for mainstream publishing industry.