RE: How much does it cost to develop a mobile application?
Very interesting post. Thanks for sharing your insights eroche.
@knircky and me are facing the same situation. We are developing the steem-bounty project. That was funded 100% by ourself and took us about USD 20'000 out of pocket so far.
The motivation was purely to support the steemit community and to get some track record of doing projects around blockchains. But we are looking for a way to make this project a break-even project at least - not knowing yet a solution for that.
We also have several other ideas for the steemit blockchain which would be a great value for the community we believe. But I guess this is quite obvious that for those we need funding or earn models which will work and make us not lose money.
You mentioned ETH and EOS. I like to add another great example: DASH. Dash let Masternodes (here it could be steem-witnesses) vote on proposals of the community. Those who pass the vote get the requested funding from a superblock which comes around a few times a year. That superblock creates Dash and distributes it to the project proposal owners. So the funding is done by inflation. I feel that is a very well working governance model and heavily utilized by the community. But that is something changing the core steem blockchain - I guess we won't see that any time soon.
The only other option I see is a way where good business plans are proposed which includes an earn model which is attractive to investors. That might be something which could solve the problem.
But projects which bring value to the community but are unable to provide an earn model won't have a chance that way. I might have an idea for those projects as well - you could realize a bot and ask the community to set this bot on autovote. The money collected by the bot is distributed to steem projects with best proposals.
Writing that makes me want to implement those idea right away - and there we are back to the problem. Where to take the funding from ;-)
A grant or funding mechanism for part of the upfront costs like other platforms are trying is a quick and easy solution.
Without something more than what we currently have there is little economic incentive to take a chance on an app other than gambling that you will earn beneficiary rewards. Some of which are close to 25%. Which btw defeat the whole purpose of a free decentralised blockchain in my opinion.
If we expect professionals to invest time and energy in the technology of the platform we need to provide them with some sort of incentive. Otherwise we will not attract any development, no mater how big the Steem price gets. We will just see more people gaming the system to extract value.
This is a really good suggestion and it could be very transparent. People who wish to support projects could delegate Steem Power to it and even vote on which projects to support.
@oracle-d has an interesting business model focused on bringing in outside investment to fund projects. This project and the team are doing a great job it is a great proposition for investments. But it makes me think and I do question why so much money that is already invested in the platform is not being used to promote projects that will help the platform grow and expand. And of course increase the value of their investment!
This is a great suggestion and I believe a similar idea has been discussed on Steemit but I have not seen any momentum behind the proposals or proposals of alternative solutions that have gained traction.