[Bitcoin-development] An "app store" and non-network transaction fees

[Wendell]

Hi everyone,

Our OS X wallet "Hive" features an integrated application platform. We hope this will be a great way for folks new to Bitcoin to discover a variety of Bitcoin businesses, from exchanges, to merchants, to games. The applications are locally hosted HTML/JS, and generally feature the most stripped-down UIs possible. We display them in a mobile-proportioned WebKit frame inside of Hive itself. Transaction requests within apps trigger native Cocoa dialogue boxes and everything feels nicely integrated and secure.

Should Hive succeed in gaining a foothold, we hope that we may one day be able to sustain ourselves via an aggregate of very small fees on transactions within this app platform. We like the approach because it lets us stay focused on making Hive great, and keeping it free, but at the same time we recognize that it is a kind of obligatory middleman... With all that that implies? I'm not totally sure, and that's what the question is about.

Obviously there are a couple of brain-dead approaches: We could track what users do in the app, and send the business a bill (with blockchain proof, of course). Or, we could avoid troubling the business and have each user send a micro-transaction to some address of our choosing. The first one is messy and essentially makes us spyware. The second one is technically difficult, making a mess of transaction history, balances, and possibly in-app price listings. I'm not happy with either, but would lean towards the second one if I had to choose.

I'm not 100% sure if this is the appropriate venue for it, but before we make that decision, I wanted to state our intentions and see if I could get some fresher ideas in the door. We want to be as ethical and (ideally) decentralized as possible -- priorities #1 and #2 -- but are otherwise open-minded.

Some technical details for the curious:

1) Yes, everything will be free software under a GPL license -- including the app store and the apps themselves! That may seem to be risky given our proposed business model, but we are open-minded and think we very much welcome the 'competition' of a would-be forker / hope we can work together. ;-)

2) Although our BitcoinKit.framework supports both bitcoind and bitcoinj, we will be using bitcoinj with an integrated VM for the time being. The main draw is SPV, although to be honest we would prefer to support the network more via something like Peter Todd's partial UTXO sets idea (hint hint, anyone?).

We will be at the conference in Amsterdam on the 27th of this month if any of you want to meet and discuss.

Thanks for your time,
-wendell

grabhive.com | twitter.com/grabhive | gpg: 6C0C9411

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