thanks for the writeup. I followed you and will read more on raiblocks but my first feeling says that as soon as the incentives for the infrastructure providers aka representatives are worked out more in the fashion of a decentralized application, the system can pick up.

In general every crypto currency nowadays seems to be a dAPP without calling it one. Financial incentives bring people together working on a common project. projects with relatively low financial incentives might get replaced by systems with better financial incentives. The same goes for IOTA, which is driven by enthusiasts that themselves own almost no crypto. Interestingly IOTA is lacking financial incentives at exactly the same place in the system as Nano: infrastructure providers don't get paid. The same point is made regarding who will have a reason to run the system by saying if companies who use the tangle for distributing data or selling sensor data will pay for the servers.

In the case of IOTA this might be true. For one it is possible to outsource the PoW from the IoT devices to the masternodes. Those can even take a transaction fee by only accepting transactions that contain a output to the masternodes wallet, the fee. If you think about what applications truly benefit of blockchains the use as marketplace that aggregates supply and demand in a discrimination free fashion, is the best bet for both, customers and producers, to connect themselves to in the long run.

Platforms like amazon or netflix aggregate the customer and make them the product that suppliers can "buy" from the platform, thus blackmailing the supplier. In case of crypto market places this can't happen since the customer has a direct relationship with the supplier. both use the market place only for discovery. so in case of the IOTA data market place the interest of business participants to support the marketplace without controlling it will be real.

I want to add that after reading your post and find you only got $0.60 from it, I'm not sad anymore that I only get $0.05 most of the time. The curation algorithm of steemit doesn't work out. Interesting that they decided to roll it out to other venues as smart media tokens, when this is the part of steemit that performs the worst. I almost never found interesting content using the steemit trending or hot feeds.