CryptoCountries: Smart Contract Innovation

Smart ideas often first appear to be ordinary; indistinguishable from whatever idea came before it.

A lot of big ideas first arise in the most unlikely or common places imaginable. Some have appeared in peoples garages on weekends. Others have surprisingly sprung out of efforts focused on totally unrelated ends.

The current crop of dapp development is witnessing an enormous amount of energy focused on smart contract development and deployment. My bet is that the biggest ideas - at least initially - will spring out of projects that people simply consider games, scams or both.

CryptoCountries is one example where some interesting smart contracts and incentive structures have been developed for what appears to be a somewhat scammy game.

In its current iteration, countries and cities are represented as smart contracts. Ownership of each country and city is transferred to any user who sends double the amount of ETH the current owner paid.

The scammy nature of this dapp seems to stem from the fact that ETH from the initial purchase transaction goes to the developer (though this has never really been confirmed).

It's either that or people just don't realize that 95~98% of ETH paid when a user usurps control of a country goes straight to the current owner of the country, with the developer receiving only 2~5%. For cities, the developer receives 1% of the ETH paid to usurp control of the city, with 5% going to the current owner of the country that the city is located in, and the remaining 94% being sent to the current owner of the city.

Regardless of whether or not it's a scam, that last bit is the idea that's really interesting to me. But instead of trivial tokens, imagine that this fluid ownership structure was applied to something else, like original content.

Imagine that you can fund creators so they post more artwork, drawings, music recordings, podcasts, blogs or any other creations and you, along with any other supporter, would automatically (via the underlying smart contract) become entitled to a recurring portion of future revenue earned by that specific creator.

Just like CryptoCountries, however, someone could take your shares over by paying double what you did. In order to prevent someone from doing that, for example because you expect your stake in their future revenue to continue to increase due to their increasing popularity, you could simply pay the same smart contract double what you paid.

You would receive all of that money back to your own digital wallet though, save for a fee of say 6% where 5% would go to the creator and 1% would be paid to the developers.

If shares in a musician, for example, were that valuable I think that it would make sense to help increase their value by helping to book new venues, sell tickets or merchandise, or anything else that could increase the artist's revenue and popularity, since a percentage of that increased value would come back to you.

This is kind of amazing to think about. It really feels like this is kind of perfect. And I think I know of the perfect test bed to try this out. I truly feel like this is the beginning of one of those big ideas.