I want to share my vision for making Steem dominate the Internet via the genious idea from @ned and @dantheman to include a working market-place like Ebay. The ingredients are already almost there.

Steem has naturally included a working Paypal for payments. What is missing in my eyes and which easy to use functionality has to be implemented is the subject of this article.

We need to increase demand for Steems... right now the only reason to buy Steems is:

1. Demand for influencing the trends on Steemit by ad agencies. Right now this demand still is not very high, but might reach billions in USD in the future.
2. Speculation about future demand. This speculative demand is what the price drives today. Based solely on point 1, as payment functionality probably never will be using Steems so much for payment functionality. And Steem Dollars cannot be created using Steem directly.

So I would like to see additional demand for Steem for other reasons than people trying to power up in the future. Taking Bitshares as an example, which uses bitshares as collateral, tying the collateral up and making it not available for trading.

In the case of Steem, we have also the inflation which is mainly paid by Steem-Holders working to our advantage if we create a system which locks up Steem for the necessary time for doing a transaction as collateral. The parties involved would get diluted in the meantime. For example if a transaction takes 5 days and the total collateral is 500 Steem the dilution equivalent right now would be 5% and lock up 500 Steems from the market. Psychologically the people involved would not pay anything, as they get their 500 Steems back. No visible commission.

Tag for Offerings / storing on steemit.com's servers

In the easiest implementation we could use normal articles and the tag "ebay". People put up the descriptions of the products and services they want to offer. A serious problem might be how to censor offerings of problematic goods like drugs, arms and killings. Here a solution has to be found. The easiest way would be to not include these offerings on the blockchain, but on steemit.com's servers, so that users not abiding by the terms of service can be locked out and their offerings be deleted by a small team working for Steem Inc.

SteemHalo - Fiduciary accounts

Steem needs to incorporate smart contracts like David Zimbeck has done for bitcoin and blackcoin. How does Halo work? Quite easy: 2 parties make an agreement on how much collateral they have to put up each in order to do their transaction in a multisig 2 of 2 smartcontract. These figures depend on the kind of mutual trust both have in each other. The reputation of the other party might give a hint to the parties involved, about how much collateral to ask for from the other party.
The Interface can be a simple form taking the application from David as a template, using the memo function to communicate with the other party the necessary codes for smart contract acceptance, eliminating this way email communications.
The multisig 2 of 2 contract can work independently of product listings, so that 2 persons can do any contract they want outside of Steemit.com and just use the functionality of a fiduciary account setup in minutes without lawyers.
If this is done in an easy to use way and trade goes up to billions of USD than Steems for this amount will be locked up, shortening the supply side and thus increasing the price of Steem.

This is a first idea regarding how to accomplish an increase in the price of Steem and creating more utility for its users...

Imagine somebody writing an article for which he gets a 100 Steem Dollars and afterwards directly being able to buy from China some electronic gadget instantly, paying via Steem Dollars or Steem, using the built-in payment and collateral function (multisig smart contract).
This would be the icing on the cake i my eyes and jump start Steem even a bit quicker. Right now there are already 2.1 Million Steem Dollars in circulation only waiting to be spent somewhere. Let us not force these people to sell them on some exchange for Bitcoin. Let them stay within the system and be of utility.

What do you think? Please leave your comments! Thanks to all of you in advance!