So, I use the term Marketplace Platform. that's not something really anyone uses or thinks about. i do. But i'm a weirdo that spends all day making spreadsheets... Anyway, the point here is to try to give you guys a sense of what I'm trying to build in a way that talks simply about the benefits to you.
As a gamer
You play Splinterlands. You bought some cards. But now your kid ruined their shoes at school. You're living paycheck to paycheck and the bull market isn't here yet so you gotta figure out what to do. Well, you've been playing splinterlands and saving up DEC. You were going to buy a few more packs and cards, but your kiddo comes first. So, you head over to the steem-engine.com/$shoestore. You find the right NFT. Maybe you contact the seller, and you get yourself a pair of shoes.
Seller ships you shoes and you're a happy dude and smiling as your kiddo plays in shoes that aren't ruined... until they ruin them again.
The goal is to back all of the tokens on Steem-Engine with as much normal commerce as possible.
Listing
Services
Digital Goods
Physical Goods
Pets
Real estate
You'll have options to list things like on craigslist. You'll also have the ability to actually sell them directly like on amazon.
You'll earn tokens through blogging and be able to use those tokens to get goods and services.
As a seller
Why the hell would you want to bother with all these shit coins and cryptos? Well, I'm hoping that the fee schedule will be pretty friendly to you. If I sell your goods for you steem-engine will take a 5% cut (plus whatever conversion costs there were). If you sell them directly on your page then you'll skip the market fees. That means you can have a market that charges you practically nothing. That's pretty different than Amazon taking 15% of sales or Apple taking 30% of sales.
So, there's a cost saving, but cost probably isn't your main problem. The main problem for most businesses is finding customers. Well, that's where the whole tribe thing comes into play. Setup your tribe. Do a small inflation. Give out small rewards, and give out micro payments to your influencers to help you get customers. Should be fun.
As a business
Establish trust will be hard as we get started. But eventually companies that can deliver and people that deliver on their services will suddenly have very easy access to the global markets. It's a distributed system. To start everyone will use steem-engine.com I imagine, but we and the future witnesses (steem engine specific, not just the same from steem) will run infrastructure to make the server redundant and stable. they'll also run around the world. So, this will be a truly peer to peer model, and it'll help insure that you can do business with partners you choose from around the world.
Lofty Goals
I'm registering as a money transmitter in the US. It'll make it so I'm legally able to conduct a lot of this business in USD. So, by the time this is all done we'll work out a system where you can easily convert fiat or crypto into goods and services. Some of this will be behind opt-in KYC. That'll eventually let us do other crazy things like sell financial products. That's a long road to go down, but it's all on the list.
The tagline is moving to "Trade Anything." We'll get there and if you guys choose to participate it'll mean that the Steem blockchain is itself the backbone database for distributed marketplaces like a d-amazon, d-uber, d-fiver, d-bay, d-etsy, and many more.
Should be fun. If you think this vision is promising and want to help consider picking up a little ENG, starting a tribe now, getting an NFT based game going, or simply send your thoughts and prayers.