Draft protocol to compensate vendors of decentralised services #35

Say a group of people create a Relaynet service meant to compete with email. Thanks to Relaynet, that service will be decentralised just like email, but unlike email it'd also be: Spam-free, phishing-free, end-to-end encrypted and serverless. Now, how can this group of people (collectively known as the Relaynet service vendor) be compensated?

I think Relaynet should offer a built-in mechanism to monetise decentralised services. Centralised services can easily achieve that by having a paywall, like they do today on the Internet, so we should help decentralised service vendors to monetise their work without resorting to ads or donations.

I've got some thoughts and some notes on this, but I don't have the time to write them up right now, so I'll be updating this issue in the future. In the meantime, comments from other people are welcome.

The example above is basically describing Letro, which will be built by Relaycorp, but the principle basically applies to any decentralised service built by someone other than Relaycorp. Especially when we implement message broadcasting, which can enable a new generation of social networks.