Feature proposal: Ownable tags

I've been thinking about ways how to grow the Steem economy. If we want to see the market cap to go up in the long term, we need to build features and services around the Steem blockchain. We need to create more real demand for steem and steem dollars.

One way would be to create more features like post promotion where users can have visibility for their posts when they send money to @null to be removed from the circulation.

Here is one idea like that: tags which can be owned. Of course the blockchain won't give them away for free. If a user wants to have own tag, they need to pay for it. The payment will be sent to @null or destroyed in some other way.

Ownable tags can be transferred to other users so they can be bought and sold.

Owner can decide who can post under the owned tag by whitelisting allowed accounts or blacklisting unwanted accounts.

Main benefits are:

• Tools for creation and maintaining (sub)communities are lacking currently in Steem/Steemit. Strong community needs a way to exclude people they don't want to see. This feature will enable real community creation.
• When tags are bought, steem is destroyed. This will help to decrease the inflation which is high in Steem.
• Reduces spam and makes the post quality better. Tag owners don't want to see low quality posts under their tags.
• For a short term this might create demand spike for steem when speculators buy the most interesting tags.

Usecases:

• All kind of communities who want to exclude people who do not belong to the community.
• Local groups who want to make sure only local bloggers are allowed to post.
• Discussion about sensitive topics will be easier when posts by trolls and bullies can be filtered.
• News publisher gives publishing rights only to their staff. They could use Steem blockchain as a backend and only build a frontend for their site. By filtering posts with their own tag they can easily show only their own posts.
• Group blog. Instead of following bunch of individual authors, Steem users can follow a tag which is then basically a group blog. Owner of the tag will make sure that only high quality writers are allowed so the tag will become more valuable for readers.
• Curation guilds could use this feature, too. Owned tags can be used to raise visibility for great but unknown authors.

Users should be able to subscribe to an owned tag in a similar way they can follow another user now. That would offer some real value to tag owners and they would happily pay for tags.

Technical details:

• Probably not a good idea to enable this to all normal tags. Maybe the ownable tag should start with another character instead of # (hashtag)? Maybe ## (doublehashtag)? That would make sure there will be no conflicts over tags that are already in popular use.
• Basically this would be fourth kind of token in the system. It could be transferred (bought and sold). Maybe the internal exchange could provide a marketplace for these?
• How much it should cost? It shouldn't be cheap because it will consume more resources of the blockchain. Maybe something like 20-100 dollars? That would make sure that very few tags are bought only for fun.
• Witnesses will set a price for ownable tag in similar way like they set the account creation fee.
• How long the ownership should last? Forever? Or should it be like a internet domain name which has to be paid yearly?
• Bitshares supports tokens with whitelists and blacklists, so this shouldn't be impossible. But I'm not a blockchain developer, so I'm not sure about how easy this actually is to implement.
• Should tags be bought with steem or SBD? Or both? Personally I'd want see steems destroyed rather than steem dollars. One big reason – maybe the biggest – why steem price has been declining is that there is not much use for it. When steem can't be used to anything, there is no demand. Paying for tags with steem would create real demand and remove it from the circulation. That is great way to decrease inflation in a sustainable way.
• What about comments? Should users be able to make comments to posts that are posted under a tag they are not allowed to use? Maybe let tag owner to decide it?

Negative sides:

• Probably needs quite a lot of work. Not possible without a hardfork. When developers will have time to implement this?
• Another potential problem: blockchain might get too complicated. When more and more features are built on top of a blockchain, the risk of bugs will get higher.

So... Do you think this could work? Would you pay for a tag that you could control? Can you see any other positive or negative effects this might cause?

I just come up with the idea and wrote it down without much thinking, so I'd love to get some feedback.

Please resteem this post if you like the idea and want to see more discussion about it!