Two weeks ago we launched Lighthouse Beta along with the Crypto Projects Gallery. Here’s a quick update about what people have been doing with the app since then.
Medic Mobile
Lighthouse launched with a demo campaign to raise funds for Medic Mobile, via the BitGive Foundation. The goal was to raise 3.5 BTC for charity and more importantly, to let people play with the app to see how it works. We successfully reached this goal within 24 hours of launch and the smart contract transaction that resulted is now visible on the block chain. The Medic Mobile project has now been reset, so we can do another fundraising round.
BitSquare
3.5 BTC may not seem like much, but what about 46 BTC? The BitSquare project is an ambitious attempt to build a fully peer to peer, decentralised Bitcoin exchange that operates in a similar way to localbitcoins.com. Their goal is 120 BTC and you can follow progress on their fundraising web page. This project is recommended for people who want a pure peer to peer experience with their bitcoins from purchase to sale.
Snack project
The second successfully funded Lighthouse project shows the power of zero fees and lightweight project creation: the Seoul Bitcoin meetup group decided to raise funds for a snack purchase for its next meetup. This sort of use case is ideal for Lighthouse as there’s no real need for it to be advertised outside of a particular user group, and being able to receive the money instantly without overheads is important.
Testing for Bitcoin Core
Alex Waters is a long-time member of the Bitcoin community. He is trying to raise $5000 for the release of BitcoinTesting.org, a site that creates downloadable and installable versions of Bitcoin for any proposed change or improvement. This should make it massively easier for people to help test and exercise new features during the development cycle. The site will also teach people how to test and walk them through the process. Gavin Andresen, the Chief Scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, has said that getting adequate testing is one of the major bottlenecks to Bitcoin development, so this project is a highly targeted way to help the community move faster.
BitcoinTesting.org is not yet a full Lighthouse project. Instead you can promise a dollar-specified amount to a future Lighthouse fundraise via the Vinumeris Crypto Projects Gallery. Once sufficient interest has been expressed via the site, the crowdfund would begin for real. Doing things this way helps reduce exposure to BTC:USD volatility for long term crowdfunds.
What else?
In the two weeks since launch there have been dozens of projects created …. and that’s just the ones we know about. There’s no requirement that a project be public or advertised to use Lighthouse, and the app doesn’t “phone home” with your project details. But of the public projects, here are some that stood out:
- Women’s Centre Calgary accepts donations in Bitcoin and via BitcoinBrains are now experimenting with charity crowdfunding as well
- BitMerchant, a self hosted payment processing system. Provides a UI like BitPay or Coinbase, but without the middlemen.
- The Stag Night, a film project by producers in Berlin (Bitcoin capital of Europe). Funding an entire film from the Bitcoin economy is ambitious but if it’ll work anywhere, Berlin is the place!
- “I need a six pack of beer”, another successful micro-crowdfund. Whilst this sort of project might seem pointless, tipping people the cost of a beer is a frequent way to show appreciation in the Bitcoin community. It’s hard to know whether combining this with crowdfunding will lead anywhere, but it’s nice to see people experiment!
The community steps up
Lighthouse is designed to be as decentralised as possible. But making that goal real means other people have to take part. Within a few days of launch the first gallery was created, the /r/LighthouseProjects subreddit. Whilst it may seem unconventional to use reddit for aggregating projects, it offers voting, posting, account management and many other things that a gallery site would need. We hope to see dedicated gallery websites appear at some point, but for now this subreddit appears to be serving the community well. An online update was pushed to add a link to it from inside the app.
The Bitcoin community stepped up in other ways. There are now more than 16 Bitcoin XT nodes answering queries from Lighthouse users about the status of pledges. Three new community run project servers have been added by volunteers, one of which has a convenient web UI for uploading projects that are then immediately approved and reviewed after the fact. This model is probably the way forward and should have better support in future versions of the software.
Roadmap
What’s next for Lighthouse? The next goal is to leave beta. This means resolving the bugs found during the beta period. We have already pushed two online updates to resolve various bugs and usability problems, but there are more to go. Once we’re satisfied the app is sufficiently polished, the beta warning on the website will be taken off.
After that, where the project goes depends largely on the interests of the people who fund it. Evolving the app to support more kinds of smart contracts is one possibility, as is improving its general purpose wallet features.
Vinumeris 