In case you haven't already heard, Steem is going to be introducing some pretty awesome new features. There is going to be groups, names rented by an account, and the name account will allow open membership as well as invite only and user blocking (to stop spamming and harassment), and each group will have a tradeable token that has its own marketplace between tokens and Steem.
There is also coming the ability to operate escrow transfers within Steem.
So, when you look at it, pretty soon this is going to be a marketplace. You just have to add an order/inventory management system and advertisments. These are features that will come later I think, or at least, I will be working on figuring out how to do it.
The things that I want to create are an email and messaging system. I figure why not just use Bitmessage for the message integration system, the user's keys can be the bitmessage encryption key and ID. The chat system I envision as being a modified version of Bitmessage, where the PoW is a little less taxing, so there is a shorter propagation delay, and a shorter line length (maybe something like 512 characters or so).
This would enable a fully serverless adjunct communications platform that an interface just needs to plug in with an RPC API, whether you are running them locally, or connecting to a remote service, and with this, Steem has IM and email built in as well. These will be encrypted by default, and it will be impossible to know where your counterparty is in the world, thanks to the blockchain-like distribution replication system it uses. You just have to be on the network and passing these blocks around and some of them are for you, and the rest are for who knows who.
After that feature is completed, I think the next thing would be to create a protocol for advertising. This would need to integrate into Maidsafe or so, for storing image files, in particular, for ads. The ads would include an advertised inventory level, a price in Steem and in some Fiat currency (whichever way you want to price it), and a user can search them, make an order, pay by an intra-steem transfer, into an escrow, which is then released when the buyer receives the order.
This would almost completely round out the features list of everything I have wanted to see in a decentralised network system, except for a strong agoric location obfuscation network underpinning it. This can surely be added later. So I have some kind of a roadmap for development laid out. This is bigger than just Steem, but the design of Steem starts you off with a rudimentary blog/voting system, these further features seem to just naturally extend from where it is now, and once they all gel together, it will be revolutionary for online commerce.
A single, borderless, failure resistant, censorship resistant, and the possibility for anonymous interaction is really not that complicated, especially if you simply tunnel your outgoing traffic through Tor or similar, onto the blockchain and chat/bitmessage network. Yes, I envision there could be all kinds of things being sold. There could be private members only groups that advertise only to those named by the administrators and secured by encrypting the advertisments to the user. Essentially, what I am saying is that it is only small steps to eliminating centralised, failure prone deep web markets, it is just a matter of arranging the encryption correctly and with the distributed nature of the blockchain, if you are also running a full node yourself, you already are grabbing all the traffic, and if you send your outgoing TX data via obfuscation tunnel...
Right now, it might seem like the system is wide open. But just like happened with HTTP, it can be tunnelled. Data on the blockchain right now is open, to be public, but it can be encrypted and prevent reading unless you have an unlock key to it. The email and IM system will do this by default by way of group membership moderation needs, as well as privacy in the messages. The advertisements I mentioned, these could be propagated as specially formatted bitmessage messages that your client sets long expiry on, and inside the advertisement, special links that load images and such from maidsafe file stores. Instant messages have a short lifespan, emails longer, last longer than emails, and can be updated to add encryptions to match changes in the membership database, so only members can see the advertisments (and thus also, enabling blacklisting customers).
One thing I can see coming up as an issue - there needs to be a way to make new accounts by buying them. Some kind of fee that gets distributed into some or other fund pool within the blockchain. Or an escrow that unlocks after a time period, say, a special type of Steem Power that cannot be powered down before some period. So it is beneficial to do it, you lock in SP, which helps the total market cap of the network, and it allows you to create pseudonymous or corporative identities, pure business accounts.
This is what I see coming from all of this. I believe Steem is just the beginning of a universal new form of the internet with a complex and powerful financial system. And eventually, also, security, legal and insurance systems will be integrated.
One step at a time, towards Liberty and Prosperity
Edit
This line of thinking led to the following:
Tor-like obfuscation is possible with blockchains that have a TX relay protocol added, so you can onion-route through nodes on the network. Proxy nodes of witnesses can pay witness nodes for traffic used. Add a slow and fast email and IM system, it can run as a component of the main node, and talks Bitmessage protocol or this proposed lower latency, short message sending system.