Steemit Economy: Broader Implications Inspired By @acidyo
A few days ago there was a post by @acidyo:
He makes this point.
Imagine a service that sells you things for your votes, being able to buy something instantly with a few votes doesn't sound all that impossible anymore. Of course there are risk of flags but maybe the service can price that in like shops do with thieves. It is kinda crazy to think about what this could mean for the platform, once we have more evolved services where you can just enter a shop, have your phone with you and they give you a link you can scan and throw a vote on their comment that allows you to buy a hamburger.
And it got my noodle cooking.
Curation economy
What Acid is talking about is an SMT-based economy where you would pay for items not with tokens that you currently hold, but with the value of your curation.
So, let's say you have a Steemit account that affords you a $5 upvote. And let's say there's a diner down the road that will accept not steem per se but the value of your curation as payment for their products.
You go down to this diner and order a cup of coffee and a scone. When you get to the register, instead of handing them cash, card, or a QR code, they have a system set up where you "upvote" an account of theirs, which transfers the value of your curation to them.
This allows companies to accept value without customers loosing any holdings whatsoever. It's amazing!!
Let's scope this out
With SMTs, this could be a whole economy based on the Steem blockchain, but let's assume that companies will do what they will want to do, which is to create their own native system that instead of being an investment in Steem/Steemit would be an investment in their company.
Today we have a stock market where you can own a small fraction of a publicly traded company. The value of this investment is purely speculative and has no other application besides hodling. Well, with this new curation economy there could be markets set up that are something like a stock market where people can buy shares in a company and based on the size of their investment they are able to buy products from the company.
Example: Trader Joe's
Trader Joe's is probably my favorite grocery store.
If you're not familiar with it, it's one of those trendy type places where vegans and granola-eaters shop for locally-sourced foodstuffs. But, honestly, it's a great shop for anyone. They eliminate the middle-man and produce and distribute their own products so even though the ingredients of everything are organic and locally-sourced, the prices are still very low. You get better food for less cost than your average grocery store!
But enough with the plug -- the point I want to make has to do with investment and curation.
Let's say that Trader Joe's sets up some cryptocurrency similar to Steem. People would buy the token and would have the option to hold it in a liquid wallet or to "power up" into "Trader Joe's Power Tokens". These TJPTs would allow you to spend influence at the store, to buy goods and food and stuff.
The value of your TJPTs would be determined by the amount of tokens you had "powered up". So let's say that a $20k investment permitted you about $400/ month of groceries.
What we are looking at is a completely different kind of economy where companies can essentially create their own internal currency to use with their customers based on the trust and investment by the customers in the company itself.
A complete game changer
This idea is the sort of innovation that Bitcoin promised!
THIS is the new economy; the economy that changes everything.
What we are looking at are currencies that are not based on trust in governments or banking institutions, but currencies that are based on trust by customers in the companies where they spend their money.
There are many groundbreaking implications in this brand new system.
One such implication is that when the value of a corporation is based on grassroots investment by its customers, there is more accountability to the customers themselves. If the cooperation does something the public doesn't support, they withdraw their financial support and the value of the company plummets.
Of course, this will be something that younger, nimbler companies will have to adopt; legacy systems are not going to like it one bit.
A company that is looking for startup money could crowdfund with the community, and as we've seen with the recent ICO craze, there are plenty of people eager to invest in innovative (though often scammy) startups. The tradeoff for this massive system of fundraising is that the company would be beholden to it's investors/customers.
No more cronyism or backhanded political deals. If the news comes out that a company did some shady shit or dumped chemicals in the water supply, that's it, they're done, the investors dump and run.
The benefit to customers would be that they could leverage the value of their investments on a day-to-day basis by having a percentage of the value of their investment as a liquid currency they can spend at the company.
Tell me what you think
This is whole new way of doing things.
I'm sure there are kinks in this idea, but we have Steemit -- still in beta -- working on discovering those kinks currently.
But what do you think about this idea? Make some theories and let me know in the comments below.
Images from https://pixabay.com
This is an incredible idea. Pay for stuff by upvoting.
I honestly don't think would work as liquidity is always a problem with these specialized tokens. Much more beneficial for every Steemian to just use Steemit/SBD.
This is truly informative post which contains more valuable information about steemit future and the power of curation. .
Excellent topic, very important to be aware of the economy in the network.
Wow such a decent idea, many would begin to work on their voting power. But there would be increase in fake ico's
Okay I get the general idea but how does one regulate the changing variables. I know I am talking out if my ass since I am reading first time about this but these natural questions are popping up my head.
The upvote value changes with my curation load. Thus if I enter a contract my upvote worth would have to have some kind of minimum ceiling which I cannot go below or my upvote won't allow me to purchase the said 'product'. Won't this interfere with my regular curation work on steemit.
I am not against the idea, in fact it sounds great to me so that's why I am asking questions
That would probably depend on metrics specific to the industry. That's a question for developers and designers of the particular coin. It's also probably one of the reasons that Steemit is still in beta: they're still figuring out these fundamental questions about how much of the reward pool goes to who, what percentage of the value of that pool do accounts with greater or lesser steem power get, etc.
It's not an easy question, but the appeal of an economy such as I outlined could possibly be worth the effort to try to figure out.
Oh trust me I am all for the idea. The questions I ask are my way of trying to understand the situation because I want to try this. Why wouldn't I!
Using your example- Imagine me being able to buy what I want from my upvote and not from my wallet :-)
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A nice post, love the idea.
Interesting. I think the big problem with this is it will take even more potential rewards away from minnows who already struggle. Manual curation will decrease becuase people will just use their account for shopping.
Maybe there needs to be a limit - 1 transaction per 24 hours or something - other wise people will become greedy and curation on Steem will go down even more
Pretty rad idea.
Great topic thank you providing the insight and putting in the hours to get this out to us. Great read.