I think it’s a good project for me. There are just a handful of freelance marketplace websites that are running on the blockchain. I did tried a few, but some of them functions like Craigslist. However, there are a few questions that I have in mind.
1. What coin/tokens are you accepting for your service?
2. Are you accepting new tokens in the future as alternative payment method service?
3. How reliable and secured is your website? I know this is something more essential than any other questions that I’m mentioning.
4. If you charge no fees, how are you guys making revenue on this one?
Looking forward to your kind response. Thank you in advance. Cheers!
Hi, cheezcarls!
Thanks for the questions!
1. Like I said, all tokens and coins. Anything that a buyer and seller can agree on.
See here:
https://freelanceforcoins.com/i/new_invoice.png and here:
https://freelanceforcoins.com/i/anycoin.pngCurrently it's all manual. So, buyer and seller manually check whether the coins/tokens moved and click the appropriate buttons. We will have better integrations in some near future (i.e. automatic detection of transfers/confirmations via respective blockchains. Something tells me that 95%+ of services will be sold for BTC unless fees rise dramatically.)
2. We are accepting all of them already
if it's not listed (Top250 on CoinGecko) - just type in the ticker and go ahead.
3. Well, our team previously managed a fleet of 100+ servers for a huge retailer (40000+ employees), so we know a thing or two. But of course it's not like we're indestructible. I mean even gov'ts with unlimited budgets and Facebook leaks data sometime. But I believe we are protected enough for a site like that (throttling mechanisms, suspicious activity notifications to internal team Slack, etc..)
We've had an aggressive scan yesterday and were notified by our systems to watch in real-time (SQL injections, XSS, password guessing attempts). Sadly the attacker was mostly throttled and mostly received "Not available" responses. So it wasn't that fun to watch.
Reliability is probably less of a concern
for now. I mean even if our uptime is 99% and not 99.9999% - the worst that can happen is that people will get their messages a bit later. We don't handle the coins, so we can't lose them.
In the future there are plans to offer optional escrow services (for now we redirect users to BitcoinTalk thread on that), that would probably require more thinking and security.
Of course, I should add, that as this service grows - we will be investing more into reliability and security. My statement about "99%" is good for when there are 100 freelancers on the site. When we have something like 10000 - we really need to be closer to 99.99% or .999 uptime.
4. We have a few ideas: paid (optional) escrow services for 1-2%; paid tests to verify your knowledge; paid bumps of your offering to the top of the lists, highlight it. I think it's a bit too early to talk about making money. First we need to make this thing so useful that people would really-really want to join the site. For that we need to invite hoards of freelancers and make sure people can sort through them (i.e. figure out who is worth their money, who is not).
