The Niche List

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.

5. Hacker Academy. Free educational video. Flat tutiion fee classes. Pay as you go for personal tutors.

6. Dating site that accept bitcoins.

7. 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.

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?

Quote from: kiba on September 23, 2010, 7:00:16 AM UTC

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?

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.

Actually, I didn’t suggested it originally, but somebody else did in the thread about p0rn.

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.

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?

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.

Quote2. 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.

Quote from: mskwik on September 23, 2010, 10:14:16 AM UTC

Quote from: kiba on September 23, 2010, 4:00:16 PM UTC

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?

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.

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 from: Anonymous on September 26, 2010, 3:05:29 AM UTC

Quote2. 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.

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.

Quote from: dejayl on September 24, 2010, 7:14:44 PM UTC

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.

Quote from: thrashaholic on September 26, 2010, 3:20:02 PM UTC

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.

Any more services and goods you want to see fulfilled? Is anybody working on any of the wanted niches?

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.

Any more niches for people to fill?

I’ve been working on a site over the last few days. The idea is to grow the bitcoin economy outside the internet and into the real world. So I want to provide a service where people can post notices about goods and services that they are selling, in exchange for bitcoins, in their local area. Or conversely, people looking to buy goods and services for bitcoins in their local area.

So basically it will index notices by location, so people can do business directly. There are limitations as to what you can sell over the internet.

People will register and then compose a notice about their business and specify their country, state, city for indexing. The rest is up to them, I just provide the index.

I’m not sure what to call it and I’m not sure what business model to adopt (eg. charge 1BTC per notice).

Any thoughts, ideas, feedback would be appreciated. Thanks, asdf.

Great idea!

A few thoughts.

Initially, I’d charge nothing for posting notices. As you want to generate trial of new users, the barrier must be low, especially as not all people are so familiar with it. (This is the model ebay followed very successfully in the beginning. once people are loyal, you can start charging small fees)

Name proposals:

i.e. Trust(ed)Trade Goods-for-bitcoins