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!
Vinumeris 