Return to Office (RTO) is starting to happen on the East Coast of the United States. On the internal sites and chatroom at work, there are posts about how other companies are handling RTO across different industries.
But that made me think... if I enjoy working from my home as a software engineer, other technical people probably do as well. Some of them will probably look at remote work as a perk. If their company removes this perk, maybe some fraction will look to do their own thing. If they're looking to do their own thing, cashflow becomes a concern. If cashflow is a concern, payments are a concern. If payments are a concern, maybe there's an opportunity for Bitcoin Cash.
If you were to tell a developer they can start a side income with Bitcoin Cash (e.g. you have a small site that provides a small amount of value), what are some ways they could get some Bitcoin Cash flow going?
Network Effects Are Not Guarantees
I was reading a thread where someone asked if the BCH community understands the network effect of BTC. That's when I realized the BCH community understands the network effect better than most. The crux of the understanding comes from realizing network effect isn't just about "right now" and what were the headlines about price activity this morning... it's also about what the network under effect was doing yesterday, what's actually happening today, and what's the network going to look like and be used for in the future.
Let's shift gears and take a trip down memory lane to the late 1990s and early 2000s in the United States where America Online (AOL), an internet service provider, was the most popular way to get to the internet. Heck, most people thought AOL's servers _were_ the internet. (Here's the Wikipedia entry if you're too lazy to look it up yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL) Trust me, AOL was a big, big name when it came to using your first home computer and connecting to a server.
TV commercials would mention AOL keywords (basically, search terms) **and** dot com domain names in the same sentence... like *Find us with AOL Keyword "This Awesome Product" or go to www.thisawesomeproduct.com* . AOL was super important to advertisers and service providers because people couldn't separate the Internet from AOL in their heads. At the height of its power, AOL merged with media conglomerate Time Warner and renamed the whole shebang to AOL Time Warner... something which had barely existed a decade ago before its brand tied to one of the most influential companies of the entire 20th century. EVERYONE knew someone who used AOL. People wanted Internet, so they got AOL because that's what everyone else was doing. The network effect was in full swing and AOL investors were loving it!
But the network effect does not last forever. Ask speakers of Latin. Oh, wait, they died out and their language (as a whole, at least) went with them. As a whole, it wasn't useful enough to keep intact and in constant use. Better words and combinations of words came along and got spread out. Likewise, eventually, most AOL users figured out how to get to the Internet, which was able to offer a wider variety of services and things beyond AOL's walled garden. It turns out inter-connected computers was the important thing, not the brand name of AOL, but it took a little while for people to collectively figure that out.
Fast forward to 2005, when the vast majority of society had learned what the Internet could do and AOL couldn't. The AOL that had taught them how to use the Internet was not necessary anymore. The $10/month fee to use AOL was not necessary anymore once there were cheaper options. The stock market started to figure it out. Economics and competition had dried up the sweet, sweet margin icing that had made AOL Wall Street's darling. No-name ISPs, cable modems, and FiOS were people's new gateways onto the Internet. The network effect that had once skyrocketed AOL's value had evaporated into a diaspora of websites and services.
Enough history. Fast forward back to today. People (and headlines) are starting to figure Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin are two different things. Crypto novelty is starting to wear thin and utility is going to be weighted more heavily as people are confronted with choices. To those new to the space, the Bitcoin (Core) label is still awe-inspiring as because of the headlines it grabs as a speculative instrument, not because of the reasons people are "using" it. To those who believe in Satoshi's original vision, the Bitcoin (Cash) label is still awe-inspiring because of the freedom it continues to provide to its users to transact and its separation of money and state. One of these cryptocurrencies is novel in its functionality as a world-wide system. The other is novel mostly because of jargon and unfulfilled promises.
Now, I know the analogy above for an ISP and a cryptocurrency isn't perfect, but that's because history doesn't repeat itself... it only rhymes. Hopefully you're listening like me and come to the conclusion that Bitcoin Cash is the best way to capture the brand value as the original cryptocurrency while having the economic and technical fundamentals to forge into the world's new economic future.
Miner Enforced Intrastructure... a barrier to entry for smaller miners?
One aspect of the Miner Enforced Infrastructure fund that I haven't heard much about is that it's a barrier to entry for smaller mining operations that don't have the scale of the larger ones. It's essentially reducing margins by over 10% in a commodity business. That's lethal. It's like combining regulatory hurdles with taxation.
If a member can't opt out of paying without leaving their community or stopping participation, it's functionally a tax. Semantics about if it's a "tax" might be fun and all, and it might be cool to think about how implementing this takes advantage of BCH/BTC price differences, but one very important thing is how the system dynamics are being rearranged.
Instead, if "the community" has decided it's virtuous for miners to contribute to software development, the developers and miners should start establishing methods to signal community conventions. I'm short for time, so I only have one example for now:
If a mining pool is using a particular software distribution, that distribution could hardcode contribution addresses into the software they distribute. Then, the mining pool would have to take deliberate action to remove or alter that contribution, which would make it public they are exploiting the commons. This could become a focus point for debate about whether or not the action was warranted. Other software implementations could do similar things as well. The "value" of leaving the software a 3rd-party is leveraging unmodified starts to become the market price (cost of removal + loss of good will from community vs. value gained). The dynamics of this start to become more information markets can use, not merely another set of resource allocations.
The Rise of the In-Browser Wallet?
The time for browser/site based wallets seems to be coming
I had first heard of the browser based wallet Telescope 18 months ago. https://github.com/adangert/Telescope
I've been working on Op-Wallet off and on for the past year for some of my own projects because I want to write web applications. https://read.cash/@Devalbo/introducing-op-wallet-84f11fdc
Read.cash needs wallets for its readers, so there's another one. https://read.cash/
Plus, I just read about slightly more than two implementations (or planned implementations) today.
https://mint.bitcoin.com/, which is based on (or an implementation of) https://pitico.cash/
https://nito.cash/
So, it looks like there's a common need for websites to want their own in-site/on-premise/non-custodial crypto-functionality. And I can't think of a better-suited coin than Bitcoin Cash to handle it with its low fees!
Infrastructure?
As far as I can tell, all of these wallets are intended to act as Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) wallets. Assuming growth continues and more developers move up the app stack, this SPV infrastructure will become more critical. Hopefully an ecosystem of diverse providers will arise as well.
Right now, many wallets use https://rest.bitcoin.com to handle their network needs, but I can imagine as quality-of-service becomes more critical, different models of provision (either as infrastructure hosting or service provider) may arise. As the pieces of the ecosystem become more mature, this will be an exciting development to watch.
BCH + IPFS, they say... but then what?
I'm a software developer and I have a problem. Folks keep talking about using blockchains for data, but there isn't a nice, simple solution to do this with BCH.
"Storing **ALL** data on the blockchain is bad", they say, "but it's OK to use a blockchain (e.g. BCH) as an anchor."
"Keep the data offchain", they say, "and **IPFS** (https://ipfs.io/) is a good way to do this."
*And then the conversation stops and the crickets take over...*
Unfortunately, this lack of data "utility" gets in the way of writing web applications, because if you're using a web browser, you expect to get/publish your data via HTTP. Right now (based on my impressions and limited research over the past two years), it seems like everything with IPFS is "roll your own" and HTTP/IPFS gateways are "out there".
Nowadays, the SPV infrastructure for BCH using HTTP is pretty good, so treating the blockchain as a graph of transactions is really working pretty well, even for small-ish chunks of data (ala https://bitcoinfiles.com/). So as a webapp developer, using browser clients with an embedded wallet or wallet plugin for user actions and intents is an intriguing way to do stuff. However, file and asset transfer (publishing/retrieving) is still not very well-served, which is where I come back to IPFS.
I'd like to do "the right thing" in BCH-land, which for this I am defining as anchoring data on BCH and storing on IPFS, but I'd like to guarantee that files I have uploaded via IPFS are always available over HTTP and I'd be willing to pay to do that instead of having to run my own server (just like I'm willing to pay AWS for S3 data storage). So this comes down to a list of questions:
Is there a service that lets me use BCH to host/pay for an IPFS node with an HTTP gateway without having to do much configuration? Storage/time costs seem perfectly reasonable for this.
If not, is there a good reason there isn't?
Is this something other folks are asking themselves, too, which means there might be some opportunity?
Introducing Op-Wallet
The Browser Based BCH Wallet
I've been writing web applications that interact with the Bitcoin Cash blockchain and got tired of re-writing and copying large chunks of basic wallet management logic between them, so I created some libraries so I could stop doing that. One of these libraries is Op-Wallet, based on React, Bootstrap, and Bitbox. https://www.npmjs.com/package/op-wallet https://reactjs.org/ https://getbootstrap.com/ https://developer.bitcoin.com/bitbox/
Op-Wallet is an experimental, open-source Bitcoin Cash wallet library for the web browser that has a *batteries included* approach to BCH web app development. It aims to prevent developers from having to write wallet and key management logic and instead let them focus on writing their unique apps powered by the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Its goal is to enable them to quickly write and deploy browser-based Bitcoin Cash apps. https://www.npmjs.com/package/op-wallet
Additionally, removing cryptocurrency knowledge barriers for non-blockchain developers, or at least making the learning curve a little less steep, will help improve general developer outreach. Seeing a working prototype come to life without a large time commitment is an important step in demonstrating the power of cryptocurrency and the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.
Op-Wallet ships with several features designed to get new apps out there quickly and painlessly.
basic wallet management API
basic wallet user interface
the ability to run on testnet or mainnet based on configuration
nav bar user interface for included components and your own
links to faucets and sites to buy Bitcoin Cash so users have a path to getting started
There are a couple of opinions the library brings along:
identity via address is a first-class concept; for the time being, re-use of an address to maintain this identity is a reasonable design choice
you can have multiple addresses, but there is one *active* address that is intended to act as the user's default identity until another address is selected
the browser's local storage is an adequate storage mechanism for wallet information
phone screens are important
It should be reiterated that Op-Wallet is experimental and should not be entrusted with significant amounts of Bitcoin Cash.
To demonstrate this library in action, I've written and deployed the Op-Wallet Memo Demo app (app link) (source code link) to demonstrate how it works. https://bch-dev.gitlab.io/op-wallet-memo-demo https://gitlab.com/bch-dev/op-wallet-memo-demo
Feedback is welcome - let me know what you think!
@Devalbo