Are there incentives for developers to build on Blockstack other than app mining and namespace creation? Also, where does the money for app mining come from? I haven’t seen anything mentioned on this in the forum or app mining materials. Is it part of the money Blockstack has raised from VCs and coin offerings because if so, it doesn’t seem sustainable.
With user ownership of names and data, applications will be forced to find new revenue sources since selling user data will not be possible and targeted advertising will be much more difficult since the user’s data may be encrypted. Also, in an ideal world, apps would not have to rely on advertising to generate revenue because this business model incentives capturing user attention rather than creating quality content.
In my opinion, app mining and namespace creation both seem very limited in their ability to incentivize developers. Even when there’s a monthly $1 million payout to app developers, the majority of apps will only be able to support a small team. For namespace creation, I’d assume most apps won’t need namespaces because users will just use their Blockstack ID as their identity.
I’m trying to learn more about Blockstack so it would be great if anyone could send along further readings on these topics. Thanks in advance.
It comes from VC money for now, but when the mining system goes live in Q1 of next year, part of the coinbase will be diverted into a STX pool dedicated towards app mining payouts. Per the token economics paper, this will have funding for at least 10 years.
This is a feature, not a bug .
Also, in an ideal world, apps would not have to rely on advertising to generate revenue because this business model incentives capturing user attention rather than creating quality content.
This is the way most software companies work today. Only Google and Facebook make most of their money through advertising; most everyone else makes money by selling a product or service (e.g. Dropbox, Netflix, Microsoft, and so on). So this goal is achievable for Blockstack apps – there’s precedent for it.
What Blockstack is focused on is making it so users own their data, and developers don’t have to host it (nor pay to host and secure it). So it’s arguably easier for a Blockstack app to be profitable than a SaaS app – there’s little or no operational expenditure by comparison.
App mining is not, and has never been, meant to pay your bills indefinitely. It has been meant to help founders get bootstrapped building on Blockstack. The intention was always that they would ultimately find an app-specific revenue stream.
The smart contract platform we’re building is meant to help developers build self-funding apps in the medium term, but developers today can already simply take payment for services rendered through e.g. Stripe. This is one of the reasons Blockstack apps are built as normal Web apps – to give developers the widest access possible to all existing infrastructure, including payment infrastructure.
Looks like social networks would need a new source of revenue. Have any ideas what that could be? I think subscription based networks may have potential although people are used to free social media. Or maybe some form of social crypto currency. I’m personally not a fan of steem (lots of fake activity), but cent looks interesting and so does yup.
Any interesting social networks being built on Blockstack? I know that yup is considering switching from EOS.
.