Excuse me while I think out loud about Steem-Engine

I'm working through the next evolution of Steem Engine. What we have is the ability to create tokens, and then use those tokens to power websites. But the tokens don't really do much other than power websites that still dont' have a ton of traction. These are growing pains for sure.

So, the two most important things to me and tribe owners are utility for the token and users in the ecosystem. So, here's what I'm thinking...

Steem-Engine vision

Steem-Engine facilitates making your own storefront. Think of this like your etsy page, or page on ebay or newegg. The store lists things for sale in USD for a price, but accepts multiple currencies. The things you are selling could be traditional physical products, NFTs, tokens, or whatever your store wants to sell. When it comes to buying you have a few options of how to pay. You could pay with crypto and we'd use a service to convert crypto to Steem, and steem to Steemp. The seller would get paid in Steemp. The list of cryptos that could work with that is pretty broad.

You could of course accept your own token as payment. So, I run a shop for PAL. We sell PAL bracelets, arts, t-shirts, and pictures of clowns. You're able to use PALcoin to pay for physical items or NFTs that we sell. You could also opt to pay in litecoin and it gets converted.

What about USD?

The two options there are steem-engine sits in the middle and handles USD payment or we make it easy to integrate your instance of paypal into the site with your own details. We just facilitate the trades rather than touch any of the USD.

What's the benefit to everyone?

First off, sites like amazon and ebay can charge something like 15% of the sale. Here we're talking about 1% of the sale (not including credit card fees).

It puts buying pressure on Steem, which should help the steem price rise.

We make it easy to create a store to sell physical and digital things.

Users have their choice of currency to use. So, whatever is convenient at the time is what they can use to purchase things.

But I think the biggest benefit is that people can use the Tribes to advertise their product and use micropayments to users/customers/clients to encourage them to write about you. For a lot of companies the major hurdle isn't simply making products to sell. It's finding customers for their products. You're basically outsourcing marketing of your product to the hive of users who you pay to write about you. You're paying them in micropayments of what your store sells!

What can you sell?

Well, if you tie it to an NFT literally anything. But here are three major categories-

Labor
I've been dying to get a job board created for a few years and haven't had the bandwidth or dev to figure this out. But now you could create an NFT that represents 10 paintings, 30 hours of code, 3 hours of tutoring, 1 hr of awkward hugging, your thoughts and prayers, or literally anything you can think of. Make a store, make an NFT, put the NFT up for sale, it sells, when the customer redeems it you provide the service!

physical items just like any other site you could sell physical products. Someone could buy a coffee from your shop. They purchase the NFT. In order to receive the coffee you have to redeem the NFT. You could get discounts for buying more at once. So, you could buy an mega bunch NFT that has 10 coffee NFTs in it that comes at a 20% discount. You nuke the mega bunch, get 10 coffees and spend them individually.

digital items I see these like rights to play songs, ownership of movies, a chainmail set in a game, a set of tokens, some collectable, a skin in a game, naming rights, digital signage, or who knows what. The internet mind is pretty creative. I'm not sure I can envision everything that you all will come up with. But whatever you come up with can be turned into an NFT and you can sell it, redeem it, and provide a digital product or service.

What's this look like?

Customer wants to buy a coffee.

The barista wants to sell one.

The Barista creates a shop, and then issues 100,000 coffee NFTs. She makes some mega bunches that have 10 coffee tokens in there and sells them at a discount.

The user buys the mega bunch, nukes the token into the parts, and then goes to buy coffee. At the shop the user sends one token to @coffeeshop on steem. The Barista checks the wallet and gives the user one hot cup of Joe.

The customer loves it. So, they go onto coffeeshop.com and write a short blog about the experience. Coffeeshop upvotes them and so do several others. Now customer has 0.2 new Coffee coins and the Barista gets another customer or two from the Customer's network!

So, what's the overall vision again?

You make a store front, make all the items NFTs, people buy them, redeem them, seller provides a product or service.

The customer can write up the experience on the blog or forum and the site owner can pay the user with additional product. They get exposure and if it's a one tie purchase like an area rug having a little extra scratch could be a gift to a friend who then buys at the same store!