A future without paywalls.

Ever get frustrated looking at paywalls? You want something on the Internet, but you'd have to go through a relatively tedious process of filling out forms and typing out credit card details. Paypal makes it easy, it's almost a form of solution that stands between STEEM and those messy paywalls with multiple forms to fill-in.

Paywalls suck. Period.

Meet STEEM, it's the next evolution of Paypal. Paypal is just like a good old buddy. It doesn't really stand in your way as much as a paywall does. But it still stands in the way. STEEM will skip paywalls, giving you direct access to instantly share or send STEEM, and acquire access instead of paying a paywall. No fuss. Just VOTE.

Paywalls may have enduring markets of their own that won't go away anytime soon. But I think most industries will tend to zero paywalls and opt for low-friction microtransactions in the future.

Just VOTE to share / send STEEM as a way of PAYING for access to voting functionalities.

What compelling business cases can be made for such a playing field? Depending on account stakes and voting activities that go around here, per vote payout amounts are dynamic and ranges wildly from user-to-user. Alright so first of all, what can we conceivably use our vote on STEEM for? Let's frame this based on our many different voting operations.

Vote-as-Charity

Are activities on blockchains like STEEM philosophically philanthropic in nature? It all depends on what you think about the concept of charity. I know I'll be stretching it, but I'll go the mile to say that everyone of us actually have different degrees of disorders. It's just the human condition. In that sense, maybe votes can be thought of as continuous micro-charity, sharing STEEM through voting on posts / comments / account wallets. This actually borderlines Voting-as-Support.

But that aside, truly charitable voting besides "accidental" charities like all of us are entirely in the realm of what Steemit does as well, on occasion. Philanthropic organisations may even improve the effectiveness of their funds by tapping into the open, public, and consensus-based qualities of certain blockchains. Vote-as-Charity may also end up being philosophically accurate.

If that happens, companies, sports events, celebrities, etc would start promoting charitable-like blockchains without even asking for sponsorship fees. Don't these guys love being associated with the act of giving back anyway? Better to do it using the transparency of blockchains rather than through opaque transactions. But of course there will be legal problems of anonymity of not knowing where the fund comes from, and not knowing where the funds are going to. In any case, most blockchains may be vehicles for charity in all its forms, depending on how you view it.

Anyway, check out this page out for the philanthropic qualities in blockchain technology: https://www.slideshare.net/cafonline/giving-unchained-could-the-blockchain-transform-charity

_{Be philanthropic without paywalls! Just vote.}

Vote-as-Support

We're entrepreneurial creatures and we do all sorts of funny stuff to provide value to others. So in this sense, I like voting for whatever or whoever I think imparted value to me. Value can be found in anything - entertainment, friendship, knowledge, differences-in-opinion, whatever. It's not rocket science.

Support your favourite contents and creators without paywalls! Just vote.

Vote-as-Purchase

There are plenty of innovative possibilities within the realm of this operation. Votes should enable both micro and macro payments, while at the same time payment through voting could be done through the usual mechanism of sharing the reward pool, or some trigger to automatically pay from the wallet just by voting. Purchase can be goods, services, covering both one-off and subscription based payment models. For example:-

• Vote to purchase digital goods. System will automatically calculate the voting power required to reward sufficient STEEM for user to acquire said digital goods. They can be any types of files. Anybody can sell content just by receiving votes. So I wonder if STEEM will evolve beyond voting just on posts and comments? Will there ever be account folders (or pinnable posts) which contain links to files that are only accessible to people that vote on it? What about having a way to dynamically adjust voting power to fulfill minimum payment in exchanging of maybe an MP3 file? What about voting and receiving other blockchain tokens? This would then require some swiss-knife wallet that supports many types of tokens.

• Vote to purchase ICO tokens. Not sure what would be a low-barrier mechanism to receive STEEM from votes, sending it to a kind of smart contract that participates in ICOs and receive ICO tokens conveniently. In this case, it would be useful to have very high powered votes that share more STEEM from the reward pool just to buy more into the ICOs. But of course, at the cost of sapping an account's voting power by huge amounts. Similarly, usual STEEM voting behaviour enabling participation in ICOs is an extremely great, seamless way to do so. ICO "paywalls" are relatively more complex for the user experience. Voting to purchase ICO tokens is quite out of this world. Thanks to @wingz for this neat idea.

• Vote to subscribe to service. To rent smart cars? To subscribe to hedge funds? Many possibilities. I'd imagine programmable smart-contracts to be able to leverage on Steem voting to subscribe to services. This can mean a lot of things from actually buying into services provided by autonomous smart contracts (like trader bots / index fund managers). Autonomous smart contracts can actually be in the form of usual STEEM accounts. For example an account like @cryptofundmanager being actual autonomous smart contracts programmed to track a matrix of its service subscribers by distributing earnings to accounts according to the percentages of STEEM acquired from them during a time-period. Accounts as decentralised smart contract should inspire plenty of useful services.

_{Buy stuff and subscribe to services without paywalls! Just vote.}

Vote-as-Polling

@good-karma is working on this voting operation in a variety of ways, including stake-based variants. Such a feature could power many different useful community functions such as crowdfund / vc indexes, general opinion polling, and others.

Express your opinion without paywalls! Just vote.

Vote-for-Consensus

This is voting to affect parametric / code changes on both apps and the STEEM blockchain. Consensus for blockchain changes are by witness-voting DPOS. Consensus for app changes can be in any flavour including prediction markets and such. Sorry if I seem to be confused by both the meaning and possibilities of Voting-as-Consensus.

Make changes without paywalls! Just vote.

Vote-as-Tipping

Such a vote actually sends minimal voting weight and triggers a transfer with a set amount of STEEM from their wallet into target wallet.

Tip like a boss. Just vote!

And more..

Are all of the possibilities in fulfilling voting operations actually a space for developers to start innovating and leveraging on the concept of STEEM voting? Low-friction voting for micro to optionally-macro payments (for stuff with higher price tag) and other voting operations. Some circles call it the pay-will mechanism, which is a step ahead of paywalls. It's somewhat an emphasis on access, not ownership. Maybe a simpler way to frame all of these is Vote-as-Access / Vote-for-Access into products and services.

What do you think about playing to STEEM's strength of low-friction voting / transactions? For one, I think many ventures will evolve beyond paywalls once the paywall model starts to fail massively.

_{STEEM. Destroying Paywalls Since 2016.}