Wednesday, October 04, 2017

Bitcoin, biodiversity, and micropayments for open data

I gave a "wild ideas" talk at TDWG17 suggesting that the biodiversity community use Bitcoin to make micropayments to use data.

The argument runs like this:

  1. We like open data because it's free and it makes it easy to innovate, but we struggle to (a) get it funded and (b) it's hard to demonstrate value (hence pleas for credit/attribution, and begging for funding).
  2. The alternative of closed data, such as paying a subscription to access a database limits access and hence use and innovation, but generates an income to support the database, and the value of the database is easy to measure (it's how much money it generates).
  3. What if we have a "third model" where we pay small amounts of money to access data (micropayments)?

Micropayments as a way to pay creators is an old idea (it was part of Ted Nelson's Xanadu vision). Now that we have cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, micropayments are feasible. So we could imagine something like this:

  1. Access to raw datasets is free (you get what you pay for)
  2. Access to cleaned data comes at a cost (you are paying someone else to do the hard, tedious work of making the data usable)
  3. Micropayments are made using Bitcoin
  4. To help generate funds any spare computational capacity in the biodiversity community is used to mine Bitcoins

After the talk Dmitry Mozzherin sent me a link to Steem, and then this article about Steemit appeared in my Twitter stream:

Clearly this is an idea that has been bubbling around for a while. I think there is scope for thinking about ways to combine a degree of openness (we don't want to cripple access and innovation) with a way to fund that openness (nobody seems interested in giving us money to be open).