It feels like this Quora answer explains why Google is successful, but doesn't really discuss or provide any compelling evidence as to why the author thinks it's "becoming more and more likely to happen soon".
Also,
> I predict this will become more of a real possibility under decentralized smart contract systems such as the Ethereum blockchain, where value exchange itself can happen on a peer to peer basis
"Number of people who tipped the author for this content" could be a very interesting search signal. It costs you nothing to link to someone. It costs you money to tip them.
Yeah, but if it becomes known that that is a search signal, it effectively lets people purchase their way up the search rankings by paying other people to tip them. You'd have a much smaller pool of legit tips to overcome, because so few people pay for content, before you could become the most tipped article for any given topic.
Also,
> I predict this will become more of a real possibility under decentralized smart contract systems such as the Ethereum blockchain, where value exchange itself can happen on a peer to peer basis
...