Top 10 Finish in MintChip Challenge: THANK YOU!

Posted by bryan on October 2, 2012 in E-Business, Mobile, Web Services with No Comments

BCmoney Actions

It is with great humility and gratitude that I announce that I have finished in the Top 10 of the Mintchip Challenge with my proposed application and idea that “A digital currency can be used for P2P barter and micropayments“.

You can see the full list of finalists in the Mintchip Challenge here:
http://ideas.mintchipchallenge.com/

There were really some phenomenal entries into the contest and this has to have been one of the most well-received and highly active (by sheer number of participants/voters) campaigns of all the ChallengePost software development-related contests so far. Congratulations to all the competitors, it was an honour to be amongst such talent. While I didn’t earn one of the big money prizes for my app (you can see the teams and applications who were winners of the demonstration side of the contest here) I do feel honoured and appreciative of the Top 10 finish for the idea itself. I would like to thoroughly thank everyone for their ongoing support, and let you know that this gives me the positive encouragement I needed not to give up on my idea of creating a fairer, more efficient and transparent money system, built on the idea that one deserves to enjoy the fruits of their labour however they wish and not have the income generated from their hard work just handed out to greedy corporations via questionable transaction fees, high interest payments or uncalled for service fees.

When I started this experiment called “BCmoney MobileTV”, I had the seed of an idea in my head, that today:

we can do a better job at distributing the world’s essential resources (food, water, energy for heat/lights, etc)
we can valuate people’s contributions to society a lot better than we currently are
we (at least in North America, but really worldwide) spend alot of our time on activities that benefit other people or organizations (sometimes without even knowing it)

With this post, I am also taking the time to announce the development of a new Web Service, to be known only as “BC$”, and henceforth, the existing BCmoney MobileTV site will serve as the testbed for it. The Web Service will be a simple, lightweight tool to passively track creation and consumption habits online. This will be different from existing tracking tools in that it will absolutely respect “Do Not Track” requests and immediately stop tracking individuals on request (i.e. whether that is just temporarily or permanently).

Readers should know that the fact that BitCoin was such a popular entry into the Mintchip Challenge did not go unnoticed. A major aspect of this proposed new monetary system will be the decentralization of issuing power. In fact, it is likely that the entire system will be built on top of BitCoin, however the one thing I’d like to remove from the BitCoin architecture is the “commoditization” of BitCoin farming, where it can start to become more profitable to generate via an organized “farm” or group of servers, than it can be to generate BitCoins alone. I strongly feel this is the last major hurdle on the software side (other than the hardware and logistics problems preventing a large number of vendors accepting BitCoin for purchases, or, failing that an easy to use piece of hardware that can be used at “Point-of-Sale” in stores to make a purchase as quickly as you can with a debit card today).

Here is an early mock-up of the interface:

That’s how it will look on the desktop, but what about mobile? The mobile user-interface will look roughly as follows:

(These mockups were done using the excellent MockupBuilder web-based RAD tool for quickly hashing out user interface components with a drag/drop editing tool).