I love the idea of blockchain technology, in fact, I'm almost crazy about it. But right now, it all really kind of sucks....
Why so? Well, let's think about what is happening in the blockchain world. Sadly, there is way too much interest in blockchain as a financial asset. The investing mindset is kind of screwing everything else up. Simply put, there are a lot of ideas and very little functional tools.
The US Dollar isn't backed by gold, in fact, people tend to say its not backed by anything. But is that true? No, not at all. What is the dollar backed by? The US of A, dude. It's backed by some seriously awesome or crazy important stuff like air craft carriers, a bigger red button than North Korea's and Anne Hathaway. The dollar is indeed backed by an environment of national treasures, gold or otherwise.
Cryptocurrencies need to prove value by means of their blockchain oriented environments. As a matter of fact, some pretty cool projects are out now, but we're really still not there...
Brave browser is great, and the Basic Attention Token (BAT) sounds kind of good, but on its own, its just not enough. The idea is mainly that publishers make money when and if, big IF, they feel like donating to publishers. Sure, donations do make more streamers money than subscriptions on average on Twitch, but still, I'm not seeing enough motivation factors in play with this strategy.
Adding in an opt-in to advertising for compensation is a nice move, because now we're engaging three different crowds and creating a circle of crypto-profitability. This is a good step forward in developing a new economic world powered by blockchain, but its incomplete and not so ideal. Will professional advertisee ever truly become a thing? I think not, I'm no accountant, but it sounds like those books won't balance.
Another problem with the "attention" part of that token is that the person, according to how I understand what I've read on it, will be required to provide their attention to ads intentionally, which sounds like a really unpleasant job, so you probably won't do it unless you must: broke.
Now, I like that my privacy will be mine to keep to myself, however, technically businesses like Google knowing our personal details actually helps them target us, which sounds bad but means that they are actually less annoying and more effective at engaging people that are more likely to be interested.
How could we make this situation better? What if Brave, or a blockchain-based browser/search engine were to compensate all internet surfers for every hour that they were actively viewing internet junk? The publishers would also be paid by the blockchain browser by site views.
Think about it, browsers benefit the more people are online and publishers benefit from it while the surfer only just stays entertained. This compensation model for viewing also is much more fair to publishers, while more pleasant to web surfers. There is no collecting of data, yet surfers only hunt for what they are naturally interested in, and publishers make money by providing content that people would be interested in. Let's forget about PPC, imagine if the best quality and most fitting content actually won page rank.
This only improves the environment for two groups, but in order to put real value in a cryptocurrency, we need a full environment of income sources and incentives to spend a portion of that income. Ideas like Filecoin are great, but its not a great platform if its by itself. Data storage is a great way to validate a blockchain and provide and receive value in the currency, but its only one role, we need many.
We should support the concept of hard incomes, not soft, voluntary incomes. An example of this would be compensation to publishers at a per page view rate, either seamlessly from the visitor or directly from the blockchain itself. We should take seriously, as a global community, the idea of creating a basic income for everyone on the blockchain. Why wait for the governments to come around to the idea? We can just do it, if enough of the crowd goes in a certain direction the politicians have to follow.
Right now we have so many projects all doing one thing, but the problem is that the US Dollar, the Euro and other national currencies are backed by many different services and assets. ICOs might make you some quick profit today, but if decentralized blockchain is to survive it has to combine into a much more multilateral system than it is today.
Did you like this post? Check out Hobo Joe's post at Sola.ai: https://sola.ai/posts/Y2NjMzF
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