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.