The only solutions that will be widely adopted will be those not controlled by anyone, i.e. decentralized protocols.
Not so sure about that!
The decentralized protocols of the Internet proved that already in spades! Widescale investment in an ecosystem only occurs when the protocol is not controlled by vested interests.
This is the reason Bitcoin is stagnating.
An example of what happens with permissioned ledger, closed entropy systems in the market. This NEM coin (standard PoS with some rube goldberg mechanisms on top of it) was pumped to a huge market cap. Just like what happened with NXT, it now just kind of sits there with nobody really wanting to do anything with it. This is crazy low volume compared to the 400-500 volume most altcoins have on the Bologniex casino nowadays:
These closed entropy systems where the entire coin supply was issued at genesis had their brief time in the sun because people were fascinated by the idea of not having their shares temporarily diluted through mining, but now there are so many of them, the novelty is gone and people are forced to re-examine what actually constitutes a decentralized currency in the first place. It will be just like NXT. The market cap will remain high, but the buy side will constantly wither away until the sum of the buy side is only 15 BTC (like NXT was a few months ago). This makes them "roach motels" where you're theoretically wealthy, but nobody can actually exit the coin at all.
Facebook gives away a massive amount of photo hosting in order to bait the users to adopt, but now that Facebook has started to monetize the users, it is starting to stomp on the best interests of users and its adoption is slowing down and upstarts are nipping at niches around it. But when a decentralized paradigm offers something that Facebook can't do, it will be lights out for Facebook because decentralized adoption of an ecosystem scales much faster.
Problem is that there are much more lucrative monetization gamification models than advertising, which spam and intrude on users less. Advertising is going to die and be replaced with superior gamification which is more attuned to users' preferences.
Interesting! Do you have any examples of "lucrative monetisation gamification models"? Conventional online advertising seems to be on the verge of death indeed.
Why bombard with banner advertising when you can recommend/mention/link to something (preferably which is entirely free to start using, and which itself uses gamification to earn revenue) within the context of your content which your reader really needs and then receive an affiliation income from which is much greater than the income from spamming readers with shit only usually less than 1% of readers are even interested to click on. In other words, highly targeted advertising without violating the privacy of the user to track their interests and without bombarding them with banner ads.
In case someone might conflate this with Synereo's and Tsu's plan to pay social networking users to share, the salient distinction is that the social networking user is there to share to gain the synergies and love/reputation whereas the blog or publisher is focused on publishing (and monetizing his work so he can continue publishing). Also the social networking user doesn't have reach of readers of a publisher, unless of course he has a high reputation of sharing things that so many others reshare. So one could see some social network publishers arise, but this can't be a model to pay most of the users as I explained in the Synereo thread.