Wow, the various bitcoin promotion ideas floating around on this forum could sure benefit from a cash infusion. Has anyone here ever used kickstarter.com to raise money for a venture?
That's one of the best ideas I've heard so far.... Which project exactly... would be the real KILLER APP that could potentially simultaneously knock PayPal and/or Mastercard/Visa and/or Western Union and/or other micropayment systems.... out of their monopoly positions... if the idea had a starter backing of, say, $200,000......?
It should be one that the masses of public REALLY REALLY long for... (like an open source privacy centric facebook alternative is...).
Perhaps the pitch would be: The Free PayPal Alternative (which also happens to be free open source)
Well it's not the 'killer app', but I think this is an idea that might fly on kickerstarter:
A microstock photo exchange site where users pay in bitcoin. Let's call it BitPics for short.
Currently, stock photo sites charge between 40% and 80% (!) of selling price for photographers to list their photos for sale. I don't know why the commissions are so large, but it sure seems like a market niche ripe for some efficiencies. I would speculate that their two largest costs are bandwidth (shuffling 3 Mb photos up and down the pipe all day) and transaction fees to PayPal.
BitPics would reduce these costs in two ways: use bitcoin for transactions, and instead of hosting the photos locally, the exchange would only serve to display the photos. The photographer would have to find his own host (ex: OpenDrive).
Assuming my speculations are reasonable, these reduced costs might allow BitPics to charge only 5% exchange fees. Any profits could be returned to the participants as if they were part of a co-operative.
Such a site shouldn't need $200,000 for the technical requirements. I'm going to take a wild guess and throw out $10,000 for that, if it's based on open source stuff already on the market. Add another $30,000 for promotion and marketing to spread the word in the right communities and maybe it would fly.
