Ethereum killer app: Curation Markets
People have been speculating on Ethereum's Killer App for a long time.
It is Curation Markets.
Simon de la Rouviere has been iterating on the whitepaper and has posted an introduction to it with a bunch of ideas.
Not a lot of people are getting a glimpse of the potential. Think how reviews underpins our internet / (online shopping):
pretty much whenever a user doesn't have enough information and gets the need to check out reviews to make an informed decision.
Then, consider how critical reviews are on these platforms:
- Amazon
- Ebay
- Airbnb
- Apple store
They have served us well so far, but I can barely remember the last time I have given a review. I consider it as a waste of time because I have already absorbed the sunk cost. I never got any value out of of it, I downright don't do it.
Implementations of curation markets will not give you an option but to participate.
Let's say Alice buys a new toy, plays with it and realizes how freaking awesome it is.
Instead of just posting a review, she buys a bunch of tokens of that product. (based on how much she thinks it is going to be huge, and how much she has on her pocket).
As more people find out about the toy, they would go through the same process: biding the token's price up. Alice sells the token later and pockets the profits.
Simon has written a detailed market analysis / mechanics on how it works.
This is revolutionary, not only the toy seller will make more money (selling more of a product), but early adopters get to make money by signaling to the market of the (awesomeness / hotness) of the product early.
In a way steemit currently has the same kind of curation model, the only difference is that in this scenarios the products: (tangible products, articles, services...) will have tokens on their own.
This even solve the problem of fake reviews, as you would know for every user whether they liked the product or not just from their actions on tokens.
With this everyone participates. So you get all data points.
In the case where users keep on selling the token (kindof shorting it) the price will drop below zero.
(Though untested) I anticipate that humans are good at staying away from negative numbers.
So how would this affect us:
When you buy a product or service you will be automatically issued a token representing that product.
After a day or week of use or service, you would either sell or buy more of the token.
The overall brand equity of a company becomes the summation of its products' token values.
#TokenizeEverything will swoop us under our feet for the better.
It is an interesting idea. However, I can see that people may simply choose to sell the token to reduce the cost of ownership of the product they just bought. So this may not accurately reflect their sentiment about the product.
Thanks for the input @amexperts. Took some time to meditate on this.
Yes, I could see that phenomenon happening for average products, however the cost of ownership is similar to any digital currencies or Erc20 tokens (ie a single eth address can be associated with a bunch of these).
Right now with hardware wallets like Trezor, you can have multiple accounts/addresses for supported currencies. Therefore for awesome products, holding their tokens will be like holding some btc or eth in speculative terms.
PS: [For Trezor] The maximum number of accounts per currency per wallet is 10: https://blog.trezor.io/wallet-accounts-and-addresses-bdfa6b66b037
Cool idea, worth exploring further! Thanks for putting it on my radar.
What is stopping someone buying products and manipulating the markets for own personal gain? Like, any old crap, but they have a large following or access to influencers etc...
Agree, if you just create an artificial futures market for the potential enjoyment of future product owners it is way to easy to manipulate.
There needs to be stronger ties to either actual product (sales) performance, or some other kind of real world factor.
Could be interesting to create it as a tokenized microsecurity, where some portion of the profits generated form the sale of the product accrue to the token holders.
(Though that would at this stage be a regulatory shitshow...)