I have been reading through the U Network white paper and want to talk about potential applications so you can imagine with me where the future of the internet is.

U Network is focused on applying new token ‘trustless’ economics to online communities. We know how powerful economic incentives and network effects are. After all, we do follow our biological impulses most of the time (maybe this is why the team named their currency Sugar).

It is only a matter of time before all the online communities like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, start introducing economic structures because of those benefits. Economic systems will drive behavior, increase value, improve content discovery, and so forth better than any alternative. When the cost of implementing these systems decreases (eg. plug-and-play) more companies will jump on-board defining a new model for the internet.

It is possible many of our challenges are at least as much social as they are economic — related to a lack of community and connection to something greater than ourselves — Mark Zuckerberg on the future of Facebook

David Marcus, the head of its Messenger platform and a former CEO of PayPal, said he’s leaving Messenger and “setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch.” Reddit’s team talks about Ethereum and the Twitter CEO says Bitcoin will be the world’s universal currency.

The challenge with exchanging, storing value in online groups today is a lack of trust. With the smart-contract, you don’t need to trust strangers on the internet. Now, economic activity can flourish online and be structured in-line with the community’s shared goals. It is only a matter of time until we see a unicorn in this space.

These two following lists are a quick grab from the U Network white-paper.

Application use cases:

Paid digital literature

Content platform

Q&A Platform

Blog, Forum UGC Platform

Content Aggregation Platform

Social Media Platform

Music, Audio, Short Video, Long Video, Stream

Some features:

Follow and subscribe

Content Ranking

Co-investing

Survey, voting, prediction market

Advertisements (all revenue goes to content-reward pool)

Gifting

Paid subscription, Paid Q&A, Pay to Message

So as a thought experiment, you can connect any two (or multiple) from each list, for example

Pick Social Media Platform — Facebook Pick Feature(s) — Gifting

or

Reddit + Content ranking

Steemit + Co-investing

Wordpress + Paid subscription

Twitter + Paid Survey

Quora + Pay to message

…

Imagine the possibilities. Deep biological impulses and prudently aligned economic incentives will challenge all existing models. U Network is well posed, with the right timing, the right team, and the right place to seize this opportunity.

My one caveat is the team allows flexibility for important variables, so communities can experiment, emergent properties can develop, and best practices can emerge organically to avoid the following:

- Neutrino