Interesting thought from Acidyo regarding the middleman service - although part of my love for Steem is the absolute lack of fees and the accompanying 'clarity' of transfers made on this blockchain. Not here to be negative, just letting it sink in and trying to figure out how it would work so that both the seller as well as the buyer feel like it's an easy 'contract'. As the Steem whitepaper states:

The fundamental problem with charging transaction fees is that micropayments don’t work, especially forlow-value user actions. When a fee is charged on every transaction, it limits the types of transactions thata decentralized network can process. Regardless of how rational the argument for the necessity of fees,users still hate the experience of being nickeled and dimed for everything that they do

Also, buying through upvotes is cool for those who have Steem Power to spend, but I'm a top 1% (probably even 0.1%) Steem Holder currently but my 100% upvote is only worth .12$ or about a quarter STEEM. I don't know how many people will actually use 'upvote to buy' if only 0.05 percent on this platform actually has more than 1$ to upvote? And who would first buy thousands of STEEM to then buy a 10-100$ item? I see the attraction if there's a huge amount of items to buy this way, because that investment basically gives you buying power for life and it will earn back in the end.

Just some notes, off to read comments of others now ;-)

(Totally agree on the delegations part by the way, locking up delegations would definitely add a strong aspect to the current system.)