Product ideas for Bitcoin world
Many people believe that Bitcoin has the potential to transform the world similarly to what the internet did. It’s not gonna be the same transformation (it’s building on top of internet after all), but I still found this thought exercise inspiring, and so I tried to study the history of internet a bit, hoping to come up with some ideas.
First internet products were just copies of the old world (ie. e-mail), but eventually – as the internet got broader adoption, and much faster – entirely new products appeared (ie. real-time collaboration, or video calls). First, Bitcoin/LN will replace credit card payments, but what is gonna happen next? What products and services that are currently impractical will be enabled in the new Bitcoin world?
Removing the middleman
Just like AirBnb or Uber replaced the middleman with software, there is an opportunity to make payments between content creators and consumers even more efficient. It might start with podcasts, music, videos, tutorials, recipes, or 3d printing blueprints.
This will likely decrease the need for ads.
It will also get rid of custom tokens that are locked in specific platforms, such as Minecraft points.
Community funding
It’s not just funding personal projects like people do on Kickstarter. Without inflation and inability to enforce sales/income taxes, we will need to figure out how to fund community projects: social and medical (help old or sick people), education, safety (firemen, police, army).
Decentralized organizations
With efficient payments and more individual privacy there will be less incentives for large monolith corporations. By paying for a product, the customer will be able to directly pay all the modules used inside the product. People will easily work for multiple organizations in parallel, and this will require new tools and processes for organizing decentralized organizations.
New problems
All these innovations will also create new problems. For instance, we can stream micro payments for every little thing, but that might be too much cognitive overhead for the customer to make so many decisions. Using different Lightning wallets for purchases is gonna make it hard to organize and track my overall spending. Losing your keys is different than forgetting your debit card pin. There will be many more new problems and we will need tools to solve them.
What else do you think Bitcoin could enable?