It is not entirely clear at this time how this business may become profitable. Below are some possible ways to raise funds, along with the expected expenditures. For details of user interactions with the website, refer to myInfo.org.

Sources of Income

• Registration fee as users sign up. This could be an initial fee plus an annual membership fee. The price structure is yet to be determined. This might be set at a relatively low cost, say $20, to encourage people to register, and a low annual fee, say $5 if the user only signs in once a week or $10 if the user signs in more frequently.
• Administrative costs charged per block, as a one-time in perpetuity fee. The costs are yet to be determined. This might be set at a relatively low number, say $1, because most users will have hundreds of blocks; large organizations may have thousands of blocks.
• Ads, preferrably limited to one ad the user can skip after 5 or 10 seconds, when the user signs on.

Expenditures

• Cost of domain. Currently GoDaddy wants $2000 for the domain name myInfo.org.
• Space in Public Cloud SaaS (software as a service):
  • Cloud Service Provider (CSP) will provide platform, HVAC, power, backups, etc.
  • CSP charges a monthly fee that varies in accordance with total resources consumed. The charges for SSL web certificate installation and renewal will likely be included in the monthly fee.
  • CSP will provide specified operating system and applications, including applying patch updates.
  • Linux servers are often as cheap to operate as Windows servers, require less resources, and can be suitably hardened.
  • CSP does not provide code required for the business.
• Programmer(s) to build and maintain the business code and website, and to monitor and maintain disk space consumed.
• Staff to run organization (C-suite and personnel). At a minimum, the following roles should be segregated: CEO, Programmers, Operations, Financials (AP, AR, Payroll), and Marketing. At least initially, the CEO may include the CFO and CISO roles, and the Financials team may include HR.

User Contributions

It is possible and perhaps even advisable to require the user to contribute to the community when they want to publish a new block. This is a "soft cost" to build consensus, in that it requires time and CPU cycles to complete. It consists of checking the Payload and/or Transaction MDs of other blocks that have been recently added by other users.

The precise details are yet to be determined based on length of time to complete each MD verification, and how much users are willing to contribute to the community by this peer-peer validation checking.

Prev page