This is Operation Economic Growth. Our mission is to grow the bitcoin economy by making everyone specialize in a narrow range of good and services.
Simply put, announce what you want to consume and I'll add it to the list. Somebody then will announce that he will try to enter that niche. There can be competition within niches too, but there are other niches to fill.
We'll hold those people "accountable" for their niches by plodding, encouraging, starting a thread and then getting disappointed when the service didn't come online etc.
Wanted Niches:
1. craigslist like classified ads for locale.
2. "Mechanical Turk"-like site that list simple jobs for people to do. Suggested by noagendamarket in the Stable Exchange Rate? topic of the Economic forum.
3. Beer supply store. Malt, yeasts, hops, etc.
4. Plant store for selling various herbs and stuff.
6. Hacker Academy. Free educational video. Flat tutiion fee classes. Pay as you go for personal tutors.
7. Dating site that accept bitcoins.
8. Easy encryption and backup service.
Niche filled or being worked on:
1. Advertising clearing house like http://projectwonderful.com. Suggested by mskwik.(I used projectwonderful to make tiny bit of money. I wonder if I can get more money from a bitcoin advertising clearing house) noagenda offered a large bounty on it and being worked on Biomike.
2. Download site like rapidshare and other crappy host. Inconvenient captcha and required paypal. Bitcoin can possibly take both roles and streamline the whole process. Suggested by Kiba. Taken by Hippich. Eventually sprawned 3 competitors.
3. Freelancer site. Taken by whichspace.
4. Pizza order system. You can order on the web, from the commandline, from your smartphone, sms, etc. Taken by mizerydearia.
Re: The Niche List
1. Download site like rapidshare and other crappy host. Inconvenient captcha and required paypal. Bitcoin can possibly take both roles and streamline the whole process. Suggested by Kiba.
That could be an interesting project. I'd be willing to work on the technical side but not sure I really have time to do proper support/marketing. Anyone interested in partnering up?
Re: The Niche List
1. Download site like rapidshare and other crappy host. Inconvenient captcha and required paypal. Bitcoin can possibly take both roles and streamline the whole process. Suggested by Kiba.
That could be an interesting project. I'd be willing to work on the technical side but not sure I really have time to do proper support/marketing. Anyone interested in partnering up?
Actually, I didn't suggested it originally, but somebody else did in the thread about p0rn.
Re: The Niche List
There will be nothing to market if there aren't anything to market. I suspect it required maybe only a week of development if you're competent. Other than that, it's about gaining critical mass of stuff to download before explosion, I suspect. Marketing can be something like gathering desirable and not illegal stuff to download, curating it, etc and than giving the link to people who want it. That can be done in your spare downtime until you find marketer worth his salt of set up an affiliate program that incentivized people to market for you.
That is very true, it is something that I could start development on by myself but the actual development won't really take all that long even just working on it in spare time. The longer term job on the technical side will be keeping the central server running well and scaling up as needed. On the other side in the beginning the marketing would be getting stuff to download (as you said) and yes an affiliate program of some sort could help there. In the longer term there the issue is going to be providing help/support which is the big part I'm not really ready to take on. I'm already on-call basically 24/7 for my main site, doing sysadmin stuff for another project (that would likely share the same infrastructure at least to start with) won't be a big deal but I'm well aware of how important good customer service is and don't want to jump into something that I'm not prepared to do a good job at.
Main reasons for finding a partner upfront would be 1) that they have some input in the design process (if you want to market to a content distributor that they can theme this download page to match their site then I want to know about that as soon as possible) and 2) so that they are familiar with how it is supposed to work from the beginning and can give feedback if it's not as userfriendly as they want or such. Neither of these is a necessity, I can code it and get a small site going regardless but I am a programmer by trade and know my limitations and something like this will need more than some fancy code to be more than just a small site.
I've been considering some ideas already and am thinking I will put something together regardless, I guess this is more of an invitation for someone else who would be interested in running this sort of thing but may not have the technical skills to do it themselves to join me.
Re: The Niche List
And on a separate note I think another niche that could use filling would be an advertising clearinghouse. I've seen a couple sites that say they will accept BTC payments for ad space but a central place to do it would be nice to have. I've been using http://www.projectwonderful.com/ on other sites and like the way they work, something like that would seem that it could work well with bitcoins.
Re: The Niche List
There will be nothing to market if there aren't anything to market. I suspect it required maybe only a week of development if you're competent. Other than that, it's about gaining critical mass of stuff to download before explosion, I suspect. Marketing can be something like gathering desirable and not illegal stuff to download, curating it, etc and than giving the link to people who want it. That can be done in your spare downtime until you find marketer worth his salt of set up an affiliate program that incentivized people to market for you.
That is very true, it is something that I could start development on by myself but the actual development won't really take all that long even just working on it in spare time. The longer term job on the technical side will be keeping the central server running well and scaling up as needed. On the other side in the beginning the marketing would be getting stuff to download (as you said) and yes an affiliate program of some sort could help there. In the longer term there the issue is going to be providing help/support which is the big part I'm not really ready to take on. I'm already on-call basically 24/7 for my main site, doing sysadmin stuff for another project (that would likely share the same infrastructure at least to start with) won't be a big deal but I'm well aware of how important good customer service is and don't want to jump into something that I'm not prepared to do a good job at.
Main reasons for finding a partner upfront would be 1) that they have some input in the design process (if you want to market to a content distributor that they can theme this download page to match their site then I want to know about that as soon as possible) and 2) so that they are familiar with how it is supposed to work from the beginning and can give feedback if it's not as userfriendly as they want or such. Neither of these is a necessity, I can code it and get a small site going regardless but I am a programmer by trade and know my limitations and something like this will need more than some fancy code to be more than just a small site.
I've been considering some ideas already and am thinking I will put something together regardless, I guess this is more of an invitation for someone else who would be interested in running this sort of thing but may not have the technical skills to do it themselves to join me.
I would think a markeeter these days need programming skills and statistics to analyze mass amount of data, doing A/B testing, etc. Although most of the work will be done within a week, I think you'll find that streamlining the download process, doing testing of different version of the site, will be a big part of your job. Let face it, there are many frustration in finding and downloading contents.
Re: The Niche List
Does anyone know about the captcha solving business? Seems you could play .02BTC or something and resell them bulk slightly higher. I've heard $2-3/1000. If people would do them at .02 you would be turning 20BTC into $2.
I don't know the details though. Who buys them? Do they want particular ones solved on demand or is a solved batch good for something?
I don't know the details though. Who buys them? Do they want particular ones solved on demand or is a solved batch good for something?
Re: The Niche List
Does anyone know about the captcha solving business? Seems you could play .02BTC or something and resell them bulk slightly higher. I've heard $2-3/1000. If people would do them at .02 you would be turning 20BTC into $2.
I don't know the details though. Who buys them? Do they want particular ones solved on demand or is a solved batch good for something?
I don't know the details though. Who buys them? Do they want particular ones solved on demand or is a solved batch good for something?
Not sure what you are talking about. I thought of bitcoin as a captcha itself. The theory goes that bitcoin are valuable stuff that spammers are reluctant to spend.
Re: The Niche List
Does anyone know about the captcha solving business? Seems you could play .02BTC or something and resell them bulk slightly higher. I've heard $2-3/1000. If people would do them at .02 you would be turning 20BTC into $2.
I don't know the details though. Who buys them? Do they want particular ones solved on demand or is a solved batch good for something?
I don't know the details though. Who buys them? Do they want particular ones solved on demand or is a solved batch good for something?
Not sure what you are talking about. I thought of bitcoin as a captcha itself. The theory goes that bitcoin are valuable stuff that spammers are reluctant to spend.
There are 'sweatshops' in India(?), China(?) that have people solving captchas and selling them in bulk to hackers(?). I'm just remembering a bit of an article I read a while back.
I was thinking that it might make sense to decentralize the sweatshop to reduce overhead and make the micropayments to workers with bitcoin.
Re: The Niche List
I was thinking that it might make sense to decentralize the sweatshop to reduce overhead and make the micropayments to workers with bitcoin.
Nobody have volunteer yet for any of those niches, which I think in theory can be done in a few weeks time.(my niche is writing the software for bitpredict)
Re: The Niche List
Does anyone know about the captcha solving business? Seems you could play .02BTC or something and resell them bulk slightly higher. I've heard $2-3/1000. If people would do them at .02 you would be turning 20BTC into $2.
I don't know the details though. Who buys them? Do they want particular ones solved on demand or is a solved batch good for something?
I don't know the details though. Who buys them? Do they want particular ones solved on demand or is a solved batch good for something?
Not sure what you are talking about. I thought of bitcoin as a captcha itself. The theory goes that bitcoin are valuable stuff that spammers are reluctant to spend.
There are 'sweatshops' in India(?), China(?) that have people solving captchas and selling them in bulk to hackers(?). I'm just remembering a bit of an article I read a while back.
I was thinking that it might make sense to decentralize the sweatshop to reduce overhead and make the micropayments to workers with bitcoin.
spammers, not hackers.
Re: The Niche List
I was thinking that it might make sense to decentralize the sweatshop to reduce overhead and make the micropayments to workers with bitcoin.
I dunno man, making 4000 gmail accounts to forward that email that makes Bill Gates give 1000 rainbows to dieing children?
I don't know legit uses, but I hate solving them, especially that IRC one and I'd pay .5BTC if I could click and make it solved.
Just a niche I thought of, prolly a bad one.
Re: The Niche List
I was thinking that it might make sense to decentralize the sweatshop to reduce overhead and make the micropayments to workers with bitcoin.
I dunno man, making 4000 gmail accounts to forward that email that makes Bill Gates give 1000 rainbows to dieing children?
I don't know legit uses, but I hate solving them, especially that IRC one and I'd pay .5BTC if I could click and make it solved.
Just a niche I thought of, prolly a bad one.
Just pay .5BTC that prove you are human. If you can make spammers pay for everything they spam, you have done well.
Re: The Niche List
I was thinking that it might make sense to decentralize the sweatshop to reduce overhead and make the micropayments to workers with bitcoin.
I dunno man, making 4000 gmail accounts to forward that email that makes Bill Gates give 1000 rainbows to dieing children?
I don't know legit uses, but I hate solving them, especially that IRC one and I'd pay .5BTC if I could click and make it solved.
Just a niche I thought of, prolly a bad one.
Just pay .5BTC that prove you are human. If you can make spammers pay for everything they spam, you have done well.
That works as an e-mail tax. Doesn't work so well in the case of captchas, which are usually for registration on a site. .5 is not enough to discourage a spammer form registering and too much to attach as a charge for every post.
Re: The Niche List
I was thinking that it might make sense to decentralize the sweatshop to reduce overhead and make the micropayments to workers with bitcoin.
I dunno man, making 4000 gmail accounts to forward that email that makes Bill Gates give 1000 rainbows to dieing children?
I don't know legit uses, but I hate solving them, especially that IRC one and I'd pay .5BTC if I could click and make it solved.
Just a niche I thought of, prolly a bad one.
Just pay .5BTC that prove you are human. If you can make spammers pay for everything they spam, you have done well.
That works as an e-mail tax. Doesn't work so well in the case of captchas, which are usually for registration on a site. .5 is not enough to discourage a spammer form registering and too much to attach as a charge for every post.
.5 * 1000 is 500 bitcoin. .5 * 10000 or so is 5,000 bitcoin. .5 * 100000 is 50,000 bitcoin. Imagine if the spammer want to register million of time across sites. The cost will run up very quick.
Well, of course, you can adjust the price of posting a little bit.
Re: The Niche List
I was thinking that it might make sense to decentralize the sweatshop to reduce overhead and make the micropayments to workers with bitcoin.
I dunno man, making 4000 gmail accounts to forward that email that makes Bill Gates give 1000 rainbows to dieing children?
I don't know legit uses, but I hate solving them, especially that IRC one and I'd pay .5BTC if I could click and make it solved.
Just a niche I thought of, prolly a bad one.
Just pay .5BTC that prove you are human. If you can make spammers pay for everything they spam, you have done well.
That works as an e-mail tax. Doesn't work so well in the case of captchas, which are usually for registration on a site. .5 is not enough to discourage a spammer form registering and too much to attach as a charge for every post.
.5 * 1000 is 500 bitcoin. .5 * 10000 or so is 5,000 bitcoin. .5 * 100000 is 50,000 bitcoin. Imagine if the spammer want to register million of time across sites. The cost will run up very quick.
Well, of course, you can adjust the price of posting a little bit.
A spammer doesn't need to register millions of times though, just once per site. Then he just sends millions of messages.
Re: The Niche List
I was thinking that it might make sense to decentralize the sweatshop to reduce overhead and make the micropayments to workers with bitcoin.
I dunno man, making 4000 gmail accounts to forward that email that makes Bill Gates give 1000 rainbows to dieing children?
I don't know legit uses, but I hate solving them, especially that IRC one and I'd pay .5BTC if I could click and make it solved.
Just a niche I thought of, prolly a bad one.
Just pay .5BTC that prove you are human. If you can make spammers pay for everything they spam, you have done well.
That works as an e-mail tax. Doesn't work so well in the case of captchas, which are usually for registration on a site. .5 is not enough to discourage a spammer form registering and too much to attach as a charge for every post.
.5 * 1000 is 500 bitcoin. .5 * 10000 or so is 5,000 bitcoin. .5 * 100000 is 50,000 bitcoin. Imagine if the spammer want to register million of time across sites. The cost will run up very quick.
Well, of course, you can adjust the price of posting a little bit.
A spammer doesn't need to register millions of times though, just once per site. Then he just sends millions of messages.
I think spammers' scale tend to be bigger than that. Anyway, it is distracting from the purpose of the thread, although it is important to discuss the viability unless someone decided to try it anyway.
Re: The Niche List
So nobody is taking up some niches? 
Anonymous#19
Re: The Niche List
So nobody is taking up some niches?
They probably are they just dont want to post about it.
Re: The Niche List
I'd like to see Bitcoin payments implemented into Tahoe-LAFS (distributed online storage), like Zooko was on here suggesting. I would help, but I'm just learning how to program.
Re: The Niche List
I'd like to see Bitcoin payments implemented into Tahoe-LAFS (distributed online storage), like Zooko was on here suggesting. I would help, but I'm just learning how to program.
Is this just a payment option added to an existing service or is it actually a new service?
Anonymous#22
Re: The Niche List
Quote
2. Advertising clearing house like http://projectwonderful.com. Suggested by mskwik.(I used projectwonderful to make tiny bit of money. I wonder if I can get more money from a bitcoin advertising clearing house)
We are working on a bitcoin business directory so an advertising clearance house would be a natural fit with this. There is one developer working on the directory at the moment so another drupal developer or two to help us out would get it done a lot quicker.
Re: The Niche List
Quote
2. Advertising clearing house like http://projectwonderful.com. Suggested by mskwik.(I used projectwonderful to make tiny bit of money. I wonder if I can get more money from a bitcoin advertising clearing house)
We are working on a bitcoin business directory so an advertising clearance house would be a natural fit with this. There is one developer working on the directory at the moment so another drupal developer or two to help us out would get it done a lot quicker.
Moved #2 to niches being worked upon.
Re: The Niche List
1. Download site like rapidshare and other crappy host. Inconvenient captcha and required paypal. Bitcoin can possibly take both roles and streamline the whole process. Suggested by Kiba.
That could be an interesting project. I'd be willing to work on the technical side but not sure I really have time to do proper support/marketing. Anyone interested in partnering up?
Actually, I didn't suggested it originally, but somebody else did in the thread about p0rn.
( Those who are fans of IP enforcement should just skip this part. Just sayin'. )
That was me, and I was specifically talking about targeting the less than legal area of file sharing.
Put simply, you're just not going to find legal content that will be effective in that market. Anything like OSS is mirrored for free and people aren't going to pay to download. Content owners aren't game - it'd be just another CDN to them, why would they pay in bitcoin, and why would their users pay per download/MB/GB when they're already paying for the content? That niche is solely about pirated content - like it or not.
Marketing would take hardly any effort, as I'm sure (with a good enough user pay flow) we could offer higher conversion rates and payouts for affiliates than the other shady CC required websites. It would take time to work out a business plan, but the actual development would take no time at all. (I could do it in a couple of days with a full-time effort) The files themselves could be shoved onto S3 or something. Just have to have someone handy with numbers to make sure it's profitable - otherwise nobody's going to waste their time.
Something like x amount of BTC per GB or MB (instead of a monthly membership), with an affiliate system would take over that market. Lots of people are willing to pay for better access to niche pirated content, but are reluctant to offer up CC and personal info directly for obvious reasons.
I also don't see how bitcoin could be used as a captcha, those are used to make sure there's a human on the other end and not a spam bot...you could easily automate the payments. For this niche, it's paying for high bandwidth, concurrent downloads of pirated content; it just won't work otherwise IMO.
Agorist developers apply within.
Quote
2. Advertising clearing house like http://projectwonderful.com. Suggested by mskwik.(I used projectwonderful to make tiny bit of money. I wonder if I can get more money from a bitcoin advertising clearing house)
We are working on a bitcoin business directory so an advertising clearance house would be a natural fit with this. There is one developer working on the directory at the moment so another drupal developer or two to help us out would get it done a lot quicker.
Moved #2 to niches being worked upon.
Ugh, Drupal. ::wilhelmscream:: I'd be willing to develop an advertising clearance house - I actually have a lot of industry experience there.
Re: The Niche List
I also don't see how bitcoin could be used as a captcha, those are used to make sure there's a human on the other end and not a spam bot...you could easily automate the payments. For this niche, it's paying for high bandwidth, concurrent downloads of pirated content; it just won't work otherwise IMO.
Bitcoin can't prove that someone is human, but requiring a very small payment for each "dangerous" action is perfect for preventing abuse.
Re: The Niche List
I'd like to see Bitcoin payments implemented into Tahoe-LAFS (distributed online storage), like Zooko was on here suggesting. I would help, but I'm just learning how to program.
Is this just a payment option added to an existing service or is it actually a new service?
The service exists, although the necessary accounting scheme has not been developed yet.
Re: The Niche List
I also don't see how bitcoin could be used as a captcha, those are used to make sure there's a human on the other end and not a spam bot...you could easily automate the payments. For this niche, it's paying for high bandwidth, concurrent downloads of pirated content; it just won't work otherwise IMO.
Bitcoin can't prove that someone is human, but requiring a very small payment for each "dangerous" action is perfect for preventing abuse.
For spammers that make thousands upon thousands of dollars a year? The payments would have to be higher than the potential profits of the spam and it would likely push it out of reach of the average consumer. I'm not going to pay $0.50 to post a blog comment, ever. A big spammer could do that a thousand times and still not cut into their bottom line. I think the fact that spammers use Mechanical Turk to break captchas already is the proof in the pudding.
Re: The Niche List
Any more services and goods you want to see fulfilled? Is anybody working on any of the wanted niches?
Re: The Niche List
1. Download site like rapidshare and other crappy host. Inconvenient captcha and required paypal. Bitcoin can possibly take both roles and streamline the whole process.
Repeating myself here, but there is open source software for that, so it would just be a matter of bolting on a Bitcoin payment mechanism. One good one I found was Mihalism Multi Host. It's designed as a free host, so it would just need a few tweaks to loosen up restrictions consistent with paid use.