Perpetual DAO businesses, marketplaces and crypto black boxes

in #blockchain4 years ago

We are technologically very close to a future where there are web-based businesses which exist only on the blockchain, which are by default distributed and which actually do useful stuff instead of tech demos. Let's see how that could play out.

Let's say we want to build this kind of a business which has the following properties:

  • An actual cash flow because it provides a virtual service to its users. It would most likely be a content platform, but it could also be a type of a marketplace, or a news distribution channel, or anything really which honestly attracts people to participate and pay for the service.
  • This business would be crypto-only, no interaction with the fiat world.
  • The business model is such that it splits profits between the business "owners" and those who participate in its economy (aka stakeholders).
  • It is in essence a web app.

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And we want to implement this business in this way:

  • We want it to be distributed via a blockchain which is also capable of handling a modest volume of data, not only coin transactions, as we will also use it as a database.
  • We want payments to be an integral part of the platform, and we want to use smart contracts to both determine the quality of the service provided, and to split the revenue from services provided to stakeholders.
  • We want the initial stakeholders to be the creators of the business.
  • We want the business to operate purely virtually, with no strong ties to the physical world, so that it is resilient to censorship, tracking, and takedowns.
  • We want the business to economically incentivise its own resilience, by making those willing to spend physical resources on this business stakeholders.

I think this leads to a concept where a business like this operates on its own blockchain (which could definitely be an instance of an existing blockchain software), with the key goal being that there's a distribution mechanism for such blockchains where anyone can run the software, as a black box (from the point of view of maintainance), on their own hardware and be rewarded for the service, i.e. be made a stakeholder.

The future is very likely going in the direction that there will be marketplaces where end-users can download blockchain nodes and install them on their own computers, and the only point of configuration will be them entering their wallet address to which payouts will be sent.

A business like the above can be implemented as a web page, and the marketplace-level software will take care of establishing a connection between this kind of a black box and the wider Internet, possibly but not necessarily by creating an overlay network (think Tor, but no need for all the security overhead). The marketplace-level software would also take care of currency conversions (swaps), and make the whole enterprise liquid.

In this way, a business as described can exist independantly of the actual hardware, as long as it is popular there will be people hosting nodes, and even if the marketplace goes down, people could built new marletplaces or just "bootleg" the crypto black boxes and run them manually.

Imagine a future where you log in to a marketplace every week, see the three hottest crypto black boxes, download and run them on your computer, and collect revenue for this service. You could rebalance your portfolio of black boxes, decide you don't want to run some of them today, pause them if you want to play a demanding game, or delete them completely without it having an impact on the rest of your system.

It's doable.