Introduction
This is a proposal for a Bitcoin Crowdsourcing Seeker & Solver website. The website will allow users to set-up accounts and put bounties on certain tasks (Seekers) where other users can attempt to collect the bounties (Solvers) by completing the task. Bitcoin will be used as the reward system since it is easy to distribute internationally and it has many other advantages over current financial technology. Seekers can post projects with rewards for less than $0.01 so the barriers for users to participate are low. In fact, a bitcoin can be divided up to as small as 0.00000001. This would allow for someone to post a project for $0.01 and divide that up into 4,000 pieces to hire 4,000 solvers programmatically. Bitcoin is a better alternative to PayPal and ACH for this international website. There is no requirement for users to have access to bank accounts to utilize the platform - anyone can start earning money or hiring workers.
Body
The types of projects that a Seeker could post are nearly limitless. There could be a one solver takes all approach or all solvers split up the reward or some hybrid in between. The UI needs to be adaptable to allow for any type of agreement between the Seekers and Solvers. Here are a few market segments that this system could address:
- Photos
- Blogs
- Itineraries
- Referrals
- Freelancing
- Affiliates
- Advertising
- Surveys
- User Studies
- Information
- Questions
- Find Apartment
- Sell Something
- Find a Date
- Anything Else Imagined by Users...
The rights to the work should also be flexible to the users needs. There should be several generic types of agreements built into the system or the user could create their own custom agreement. Some of the options for rights to the work that users might have are:
- licenses for the work
- Solver gets non-exclusive rights to use the work
- Solver gets exclusive ownership of the work
- The work gets placed in public domain
- Seeker gets full rights to work
- Seeker gets non-exclusive rights to use the work
To survey the market right now, it would be difficult to get information directly from consumers since so very few people are aware of Bitcoin. Instead, data about people that do not have access to financial technology but do have access to the internet would be a good number to examine. A lot of current internet users in developed nations might not be interested in Bitcoin or this type of work environment at first since there are current financial technologies available to them.
It would be important for reputation to be built into the system. One method users will earn reputation by successfully seeking or solving projects. Social networking will be a prime factor in the website since social networking is key for reputation. Users can submit other information to acquire reputation such as connecting or proving ownership for:
- GMail
- Company E-mail
- Credit Cards
- Bank Checking/Savings/Etc…
- Bitcoin Service Providers
- Bitcoin Security Deposits
- Followers
- Recommendations
- Ratings
- Friends
- Credit Profile
- Business Connections
- History
- etc…
The software that needs to be built could be done in a relatively short period of time. I would recommend building functional prototypes that could be easily turned into working versions ready to go live. This would allow a lot of experimentation to be done with the programming and User Interface so it would be easier to bring the product to market later on. To get a first version of this software out the door, a minimum of 2 developers that are fluent with modern web technologies would be needed. One or both of them would have to learn about development with Bitcoin since it is so new and it would be difficult to find a specialist that is already working with that technology. The time to train would make it a bit longer to develop. A very rough estimate of time would be 3 months for an initial functional version. If the project was a success, many more developers could come onto the project indefinitely since there are so many potential features that could be built into the platform. The estimated cost of these two developers would be $2,000/week for each of them so 12 weeks @ $4,000/week would be $48,000.00.
Conclusion
The need for an international platform to allow business to commence freely exists and this proposal to address that need might be a profitable business opportunity. Crowdsourcing work is extremely efficient since the system can try to match the projects specifically to solvers and solvers do not need to make direct hires. The reputation system would allow both Seekers and Solvers to efficiently find a trusting business partner. The system would solve the problem of Seekers spending resources on searching for Solvers and Solvers searching for projects to work on. It also opens up the international market allowing free trade between any parties. This central hub would be an automated tool that gives the user the ability to hire thousands of workers for less than a penny or a single worker for a large sum of money. The mechanistic nature of such a platform allows workers to find any type of work available. It allows for reputations to be built so users can find Solvers/Seekers that they can trust just by looking at another's’ profile or having the system analyze a profile for them.
Recommendation
It is of urgent recommendation to build such a platform before other parties implement their own solutions. The fast pace of technology and the minimal entry barriers for a competitor to build a similar solution makes speed the greatest importance for this project. Since there will be a large responsibility to keep the Bitcoin funds safe on the website, security is of utmost importance. It is important to make the website easy to use and adaptable to meet any type of work. This solution can allow the outsourcing of work and allow for the most efficient worker to complete the job. This solution can allow work to be automated since there will be many metrics available to match projects to Solvers. This is a disruptive technology that opens up business on an international scale and the barriers to entry are minimal, so it is recommended to further pursue this project.