Hey Wendell,

Interesting idea you have there!

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 9:47 PM, Wendell <w@grabhive.com> wrote:

Obviously there are a couple of brain-dead approaches: We could track what users do in the app, and send the business a bill (with blockchain proof, of course).

It might be simpler to not think of it as an app store, but rather see it as a set of affiliate schemes. To get placed into the apps section you can say that the business must have an affiliate scheme in place (i.e. open to more than just you) and then you use the normal mechanisms of affiliate codes and so on. The apps don't have to be offline. They can (and probably should) be online, so the businesses can retain control of their features and brand. If you refer a lot of users to that business, you get the referral bonuses. Affiliate schemes are a common way for open source projects to monetize - e.g. Firefox development is largely paid for by search engine referrals. It's compatible with the ideals of openness because their income relies directly on their traffic, and there are several competing search engines the projects can play off against each other to get the best prices. Also, users expect search engine integration these days, so they'd be sending search traffic regardless.

The main downside, of course, is it distorts technical judgement. You can get projects pushing certain businesses heavily not because it's technically the best thing for users, but because their income depends on it.

One alternative funding model you could explore is allowing users to bid on assurance contracts for feature development. This means you think up a bunch of improvements you could make, then allow users to pledge Kickstarter-style towards their development. The upside is it allows the community to direct development, and users feel directly involved and not exploited. The downside is, no recurring income you can use to support yourself whilst engaged in other endeavours.

2) Although our BitcoinKit.framework supports both bitcoind and bitcoinj, we will be using bitcoinj with an integrated VM for the time being. The main draw is SPV, although to be honest we would prefer to support the network more via something like Peter Todd's partial UTXO sets idea (hint hint, anyone?).

Bear in mind that regardless of how much you want to support the network, it's ultimately your users resources that will actually get spent. That's why I'm a bit skeptical of any schemes that rely on random end users donating lots of cpu time or bandwidth to the network. If they want to do it, partial UTXO sets and other interesting ideas are worthwhile, but I guess most users won't. I think Bitcoin will over time be more and more like Tor where relays are run on dedicated servers by people who have some modicum of knowledge and community involvement.