The customer benefit is that because the business is run more efficiently things can be priced cheaper. This gets passed down to the consumer and producer.
It's far more than escrow. It's a distributed business where many of the functions of the business are automated all enforced on the same blockchain.
Could be crazy - I'm not pitching this! I'm sure many people have better grasps of the potential and imaginations. But you clearly don't see how a company can be run more efficiently (but massive margins) with a distributed, partially anonymous structure where obligations and payments are guaranteed through the shared system.
You must not have any experience on the operational side of a real business?
Everything you've described (i.e., payments) can already be handled by existing automated financial systems like ADP, Peoplesoft, Intuit, etc. Order status is already handled by existing invoicing systems (i.e., Square) and delivery providers (i.e., UPS). And all of these systems can be made to integrate with each other; plenty of businesses do that every year.
And plenty of cuts are taken and taken and taken. There is an inherit inefficiency that exists right now because it is indeed necessary. The people, private systems and other parts that makeup the "trust" of it all that makes it work.
Now imagine we could do this in a public way that can't be cheated easily at all? We create new efficiency, ironically, by centralizing much of this on a globally distributed blockchain with computational rules enforcing the flow of business. Suddenly we don't need these companies because their most valuable asset, trust, has been automated away.
The business that figures out how to do this will claim the market of existing companies.
Software eats the world. Why wouldn't it continue to in a way that eats the existing software centralization?
It doesn't mean it's free but it certainly looks to have the ability to outperform current business models which came to be because they outperformed previous business models.
