Some initial thoughts on the App Mining Program

[jehunter5811]

@Kitsana

my concern is that people might try and rush their Dapp or create a Dapp simply so it can start accumulating mining rewards without there being any real plan to maintain and improve the app. I realize this is harder because the rewards are put out monthly and the top Dapps do indeed have active devs behind them, but I worry that the larger point of incentivizing people this way might not work in the near or long term.

I agree with this sentiment and think I’ve made my thoughts on this pretty clear with my proposal in this post: https://forum.blockstack.org/t/proposal-for-app-mining/6647/10

I think the bounty program was largely a failure. Stealthy came out of it, and Stealthy is doing great. Techcrunch Disrupt, tons of press, continued development, etc. However, other apps to win the bounty did seem to take the money and run. Coins might be another exception. I know Thomas is still working on the app, but I don’t know how much has been deployed since it won. It’s probably important from a transparency standpoint to note that both Coins developers worked for or are currently working for Blockstack. I’m sure time is much more consolidated to Blockstack items than Coins items.

But Kit’s point is well taken when you look at Dappy Wallet and whoever won the Slack clone bounty. I’m not sure if the Slack clone app actually got paid, but if they did, they haven’t even released an app that anyone knows about.

The goal with App Rewards should be to avoid the mistakes of the bounty program (which I believe is dead probably for the reasons Kit outlined). This thread is raising all of the right points to help make sure App Rewards works better than bounties ever did.