Lighthouse, two weeks in

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.

Lighthouse Beta

Lighthouse, the Bitcoin crowdfunding application, has reached public beta. Download it today for Windows, Mac or Linux. Then create a project of your own, or pledge money to our charity fundraiser for Medic Mobile.

In the past four months there have been 18 updates since alpha – many bugs have been fixed, some new features were added, and a small community has grown along the way. Even so, beta means beta. You should not be surprised to encounter glitches or rough edges. If you find bugs, please let us know either via email or reporting on github.

I’d like to thank once again Olivier Janssens, who has delivered the last half of his $40,000 grant for development of a decentralised crowdfunding platform. It’s been good to work with him over the past eight months.

Medic Mobile

As part of the Lighthouse launch, Vinumeris is running a charity fundraiser via the BitGive Foundation. The foundation gathers charitable donations from the Bitcoin economy in support of public health and the environment worldwide. Their current project is raising funds for Medic Mobile, a non-profit that develops mobile healthcare apps for the developing world. In case you feel that sounds like a contradiction, check out their website, where you can learn about their sometimes radically low tech approach. For example, some of the apps they’ve developed are text-menu only SIM apps suitable for usage on ultra-cheap Nokia non-smartphones.

Galleries, servers, peers, oh my!

Lighthouse does not include a global project gallery or search feature. It focuses only on moving money around. This is deliberate – the web might not be as good at handling bitcoins as a true peer to peer app, but it’s a fantastic tool to find and share information.

Whilst projects that are large enough will probably just do marketing and awareness through their own websites, other projects will need someone to provide them with a temporary home. For this reason we hope that the community will step up and start building Lighthouse project galleries. These are just websites that bring together people looking for crowdfunding with people who want to fund. We think that web developers will be able to do a great job of providing social and community building features when freed from the hassle of securely managing money by Lighthouse.

Lighthouse projects don’t need a server, but it’s more convenient for backers if one will stay online and collect pledges for them. Servers and galleries are not the same thing: anyone can run a server without an accompanying website and vice-versa. At launch we have two public project servers available for use, one run by Vinumeris and another by OneTap Software. Learn more here.

Vinumeris Crypto Projects Gallery

For many, Lighthouse is a means to an end. We want to explore new ways of funding public infrastructure like the Bitcoin network itself. For this reason we are simultaneously launching the first Lighthouse project gallery, the Crypto Projects Gallery.

This is a collection of proposed project ideas related to Bitcoin, with descriptions and estimated costs. It’s a market research tool that allows developers around the world to discover what ideas resonate most with people and which are likely to attract the most crowdfunding. By clicking “Express interest” and promising to pledge in future the BTC equivalent of a dollar amount, you send market signals to Vinumeris about what to develop, either itself or via subcontracting.

The Crypto Projects Gallery is not open access – for a project to appear there it must be vetted and uploaded by us first. We do this to try and ensure projects make technical sense, are plausible, are not too large and have a reasonable estimated cost. The Bitcoin community has in the past suffered from crowdfunding efforts that were too ambitious and spent the raised money without delivering. So we’re looking for developers who are willing to work in small, bite size chunks with fundraising being done after development is done, to keep the risk for both project backers and developers low.

Although these are our current policies for the gallery, like Lighthouse itself, it’s one big experiment. These policies might change in future and are open to negotiation. For those who want a less conservative approach: anyone who knows some HTML can create a gallery with different policies. You can still use Lighthouse to get the benefits of decentralised money.

What next?

Lighthouse will exit Beta once we feel the product is well tested and stable. Beyond bug fixing, Vinumeris is not planning on any further major upgrades as the current feature set meets our needs. Further development of the app can be encouraged by supporting Lighthouse related projects in the apps section of the Crypto Project Gallery, or through open source contributions. If you’re a developer and would like to get involved, just jump on our discussion or development mailing lists.

Lighthouse alpha now open source

After six months of development, I’m pleased to announce that an alpha version of Lighthouse is now open source. The alpha has most of the functionality the final version will, but runs on the Bitcoin testnet. Additionally the downloadable packages for Windows, Mac and Linux are only available to people who are willing to help test and debug. Nonetheless this is a good milestone towards beta and then the final 1.0 release.

We’ll get there faster if developers, artists and people who love user interface design help out. Much of the remaining work is fairly straightforward UI programming. You can join us on the developer mailing list or in #lighthouse on Freenode IRC. But even if you’re not a developer you can help us by testing the app and reporting bugs. If you’d like to do that, please post to the discussion list and request a link to the download for your platform. The app auto updates, but it’s important to realise that this version of Lighthouse cannot be used to crowdfund real bitcoins at the moment: we’ll switch to using the main Bitcoin network (and thus real coins) once we reach beta.

If you’re just curious what it’s like and don’t want to compile it yourself or request a download link, here’s a video giving a brief overview of its functionality. Not all features are demoed here, but it’s enough to get a flavour of what the app looks like.

Vinumeris and Olivier Janssens team up

Welcome to the first update about Vinumeris and the Lighthouse project, and thanks for reading this blog – your interest is both hugely appreciated and tremendously motivating.

About six weeks ago I gave a talk at the Bitcoin 2014 conference in Amsterdam, where I demoed an early version of an application that implements a form of crowdfunding which takes place directly on the block chain. Hopefully that talk will be available online soon. Interest in the project has been much greater than I expected and since then I’ve had meetings with many groups and people that would like to use Lighthouse once it’s finished.

Unfortunately there was a problem – although the app supports entirely peer to peer and decentralised crowdfunding, I planned to make the first version crippled and locked down to only my own projects. The reason was a plan to raise the development costs of the app using Lighthouse itself, presenting a catch-22.

Today, I’m very happy to announce that Lighthouse has won 40% of Olivier Janssens’ famous $100,000 bounty for building a platform for decentralising Bitcoin development. Olivier is an early adopter who was made rich by Bitcoin’s rise in value, but he isn’t simply retiring early: he’s reinvesting his coins back into the ecosystem. By working with Olivier it has become possible to release Lighthouse as open source as soon as development is far enough along, without having to go through an intermediate locked down release first. This will allow the whole community to benefit from easy, point and click Bitcoin crowdfunding. You don’t even need a website! We’re aiming to release code before the end of August, although it may take a little longer before the app is polished enough to provide end user downloads.

Additionally, Olivier has committed to investing 50% of the bounty into Bitcoin development projects crowdfunded through the platform. This should provide an immediate boost to development, by allowing developers who are currently on the sidelines to start earning money writing Bitcoin upgrades. The remaining 10% is being allocated to Eris by Project Douglas, as a runner up.

Project Update

Although six weeks is not a lot of time, let me show you what I’ve been working on since the initial blog post and demo in Amsterdam.

The most important change is a redesign of the user interface. The initial UI was put together to make the live demo happen, but it wasn’t the best possible. You couldn’t see individual pledges and the info shown about a project was limited. The new UI is still a work in progress and isn’t yet finished, but here’s some examples of what it looks like so far.

The new UI lets you attach cover images to your projects, shows you the individual pledges (optional info about who made the pledge will be added soon), and provides a pie chart showing progress towards the goal. A few screenshots can’t really explain how the app works, so I’ll try and make a video in a few weeks once things a few more issues are resolved.

The exact feature set the app will have upon being open sourced is still to be determined. It will of course have all the basic features demoed in Amsterdam and discussed in the previous blog post. It will probably also allow people to associate a name and photo with their pledge (e.g. synced from Gravatar or Facebook), if they want. Features like discovering projects, commenting on them etc all make more sense to do with project-specific websites.

Feedback is welcome in the comments section!

Lighthouse

About a year and a half ago I gave a talk in London titled “The future of Bitcoin and rebuilding the financial system”. Although there were only about a hundred or so people in the room, that talk went on to be watched nearly 36,000 times online. Huge numbers of people have been inspired by how Satoshi planned years ahead; how he didn’t stop at merely moving money around, but went on to imagine astonishing new capabilities …. and plant the seeds of their implementation in the Bitcoin protocol.

Since then I get email nearly every day from people who want to talk or learn about Bitcoin’s advanced features. But one question comes up more often than any other – where are all the apps you promised? Why can we still not use these features?

The answer is simple: we aren’t making daily use of micropayments, assurance contracts, smart property, 2-of-3 dispute mediation and decentralised credit markets because whilst the core Bitcoin protocol does its part, Satoshi didn’t have time to implement all the additional software and infrastructure on top. He figured out the minimal requirements that the protocol needed to support, and then returned to implementing the basics. To make these features come alive takes work, and because they’re inherently about decentralised infrastructure it’s often hard to find anyone who will pay for that work. With no way to own the infrastructure once built, many traditional funding models can’t function.

One of the features I named above is not like the others. An assurance contract (more often known these days as a crowdfund), is a way for different people to club together and raise money for a public good – something that once complete will benefit everyone, but where there is no ability to make users pay individually. The traditional textbook example is a lighthouse: all sailors would benefit from being able to see the shore more clearly but no sailor can afford to pay for the full cost themselves, and once built it’s impossible to ensure only certain ships can see the light. A more modern example is peer to peer infrastructure. By gathering pledges that say “I agree to put my money in if other people also put their money in”, assurance contracts can sometimes help break the deadlock and ensure the public good gets built. Arianna Simpson has a more in depth writeup of assurance contracts on her blog, which I recommend.

Bitcoin has supported this type of funding model since day one, but we’ve never used it because we lacked an app that would make it easy. If it was easy this would be an ideal way to raise money for all the things we as a community want to build or experiment with:

• Better and more robust Bitcoin core infrastructure, with privacy and scalability upgrades.
• Improved wallets that can do 2-of-3 dispute mediated transactions.
• Micropayment based apps like pay-per-second ad free radio, incentivised open wifi hotspots, Tor nodes and decentralised Dropbox competitors.
• Peer to peer credit markets.
• Smart property.
• Decentralised exchanges and volatility-killing derivatives contracts.
• An autonomous economy (or “auconomy”), in which robotic businesses own themselves and trade with humans as equals. What?!? Yes, really! Though it sounds far fetched, a talk I gave on the topic of autonomous agents seven months ago now has over 14,000 views, so it seems this idea fascinates lot of people.
• More generic cryptographic infrastructure, like end to end encrypted and metadata-obfuscated email.
• …. or maybe just making regular Bitcoin payments slicker and easier to use.

I don’t know if a native-Bitcoin crowdfunding platform can help us fund these goals, but there’s only one way to find out. So at the Bitcoin 2014 conference in Amsterdam I gave a preview of Lighthouse, an app I’ve been writing that provides you with your own private Kickstarter, on your desktop. It explores one possible vision of how we can build decentralised applications.

How Lighthouse works

Lighthouse combines two functions in one. Firstly, it gives a lightweight encryptable HD wallet. It uses simplified payment verification, so even though it synchronises directly with the block chain performance is as good as a web wallet – in fact, it uses the same code that powers the most popular Android smartphone wallet.

 

Secondly, it provides a way to create projects, pledge money to projects using coins that were sent to the app, and revoke pledges you made if you want your money back before the contract reaches its goal amount. Because the contract takes place entirely on the block chain you don’t need much trust in the project owner to manage the partially raised funds. Pledges can’t be claimed individually; they only become recognised as valid by the Bitcoin network when enough are combined together to reach the goal. And pledges can be revoked by simply clicking a button that double spends the pledged coins back to your own address. This simplifies life for everyone: the project owner doesn’t have to worry about being hacked, they can go on vacation for a while and not have to worry about handling withdrawals from the pot, and anyone who pledges knows they can get their money back whenever they like before the goal is reached.

Lighthouse has two modes: serverless and server assisted. In the serverless mode, which is what I showed in Amsterdam, you don’t need anything beyond the Bitcoin peer to peer network and a way to move files around. The app can be given to someone on a USB stick and it will work, with no signup or accounts needed. But the person doing the crowdfunding is responsible for getting a small contract file to people who might want to pledge, and pledgers have to get a pledge file back to the project owner. For example they could be attached to an email thread, or posted to a forum, or even placed inside an NFC tag. But the most convenient way is to use a shared folder. A completely P2P way of sharing folders is BitTorrent Sync, but you could also just use a shared folder on Google Drive or Dropbox.

 

To disambiguate pledge files that might be dropped into a shared folder the app lets you choose a short nickname – in this example, the project is being created by cryptographer’s best friend Alice, and she’s getting a pledge from her best friend Bob.

For more traditional larger scale projects where running a server isn’t a problem, there’s also a server assisted mode. In this mode the project can be loaded simply by clicking a link on a web page, and pledges are uploaded back to the server. Once enough pledges are gathered that server will automatically combine them and transmit them to the Bitcoin network. There’s no need to manually deal with files. Server assisted mode will often be the most appropriate choice for people raising money for larger endeavours, and serverless mode would make more sense for “micro crowdfunds” like a group of friends that want to split the costs of a big party, but only if enough people pledge to come.

Lighthouse isn’t polished enough to be released yet. There are more features that could be added, and I’m still figuring out what to do with it. The app is itself the kind of decentralised infrastructure that is appropriate for crowdfunding, so the initial release will most likely be a locked down or incomplete version with the full open source app being released when the cost of development can be raised through the platform itself.

Our little currency project has so far relied on a mix of countless volunteer hours, ad-hoc bounties (that often fall through) and VC funded startups. Lighthouse will hopefully add a new source to the mix: market driven, community funded contracts that let us avoid a tragedy of the commons and build amazing software. I think this demonstrates the power of Satoshi’s vision, and I hope you agree.

Vinumeris

A crowdfunding platform is useless unless there’s something to fund. Vinumeris is a new company that is devoted to the development of decentralised infrastructure. For now that means Bitcoin, but in future it may include other peer to peer platforms as well. There’s nothing more to announce yet, but if you’d like to find out what happens next either subscribe to this blog or sign up for email announcements.