I was thinking about Storj and how it is a coin but it is backed by cloud storage. Meaning that somebody who has so many Storj coins knows that if they can't spend them, they can at least get so much cloud storage for said coins. As far as I know this is the first time this has been done. It has been of course marketed where people said their coin was going to be backed by weed, or VPN's, or their coin will be used with merchants and so on but they were all scams.
But a precedent has been set for electronic money being backed by digital services. M-Pesa which is to Bitcoin's shame much more successful originally just started off as people not having any money so instead started transferring airtime minutes to each other for small goods and services. The people accepting the airtime knew that they in turn could give it to somebody else or if worse came to worse, just use it to talk on the phone.
People feel safe knowing that their digital M-Pesa money was backed by minutes. They could trust the system. I am a little jealous of Storj because they are making a cryptocurrency backed and earned by cloud storage. As far as I know, this is the first time this has been done. And I think going forward, it could be a huge deal in the cryptocurrency sphere.
I always liked one thing about Ripple, and that was that for a long time the distribution of Ripples came via the World Community Grid. I thought that was such a better idea then PoW. Ripple's were somewhat fungible with computing power in a round about way. I could use my extra computing power to earn XRP and if I needed, I could turn those into BTC and then that to USD and use that to buy Amazon servers, I could then use those to mine XRP. Now, that of course was not sustainable and anybody that did that would have been crazy, but the point was it could have been done, and if the price of XRP was shooting up, it would have even been economical. Alas though, the XRP WCG got gamed and it was shut down. But I think Ripple and Storj were on to something.
The thing I think they were onto is that a Bitcoin is just semi-fungible with waste. I can waste my computer power to buy a BTC which then I can then use to buy new specialized hardware and electricity to earn more BTC. But at the end of the day, what do I have? Just a bunch of worthless hardware and wasted electricity. At least a Kenyan if there is nobody there to take his M-Pesa could at least use it to make calls. About the best thing I have heard of for old BTC hardware is people suggesting using it for a heater, a task to which it is very ill suited; many other commercial heaters I am guessing have far better heat produced per watt of electricity used.
The point is that with a redeemable service, people can always know that their NEM is worth something. Furthermore, it helps to stabilize the price so that it doesn't drop below a certain point or people will start redeeming it.
To this end, I think we should for NEM Digital Industries. We could offer cloud storage just like Storj. Nemster's could offer up extra drive space on their computers and earn NEM, other's could pay for it. We could also back NEM with extra computing power just like WCG. Nemster's could be loaning out processing resources when not in use and be earning NEM. We could even work up to selling long distance minutes, VPNs, or webhosting. Maybe at some point we could set up a Tor like network where NEM was paid in toll fees. All of these could be a part of a greater package called NEM Digital Industries. A person using NEM could always know that even if a store didn't accept their NEM, that there would always be some digital service out there that they could exchange their NEM for.
I'm assuming then that the logical point for all of this to be run out of would be AltNEMO.
Furthermore, as some of us have thought and considered, we need a loop. We need a way for money to be circled. When ever I tried to think of different ways to make a loop (and I thought of many) I always need an entry or exit point into the system. I always needed a point of produces who would be making something that could be bought in NEM. I went over and over this in my head, but there were so many problems including geography and adoption with such a decentralized network as NEM. But now I realize digital services can be decentralized, and should be decentralized, and NEM Digital Industries could do that for us.
Now a loop can be created where a person with extra hard-drive space can be a producer of cloud storage, and once they earn the NEM, they can spend it to buy extra processing power, the producer of that then can in turn use their earned NEM to get a VPN, and so on.
It solves so many of the problems plaguing crypto. It would give us producers, it would give us a loop, it would give users of NEM trust that their NEM was really worth something.
I would add NEM advertising, NEM radio, NEM viral Youtube channel, NEM press releases to the mix of NEM Digital Industries.
So for instance, if I have a blog, I could use it to have NEM advertisements, with the money earned from that I could but a NEM VPN. The producer of the VPNs could use his NEM to buy extra processing power for a different project that needs to be tested. The producer of the processing power can use NEM to put an add on the NEM viral Youtube channel, the producer of that channel can use their NEM to tip a favorite blogger who just happens to be the original NEM blogger that started this post, and so on and so on.
Sounds pretty interesting.
Do you know how the problems with cloud storage and procesing power are solved? I am talking about ensuring access to the files in the online storage or a minimum speed etc.
watching