The Business Model behind BitPatron

Bitcoin & Credit Card Payments? No Problem!

Our developers are working full speed, our alpha will already be released next week! Over the past weeks, we’ve also reached out to Blockstack with whom we’ve had several conference calls and started collaborating.

In this post, we will describe how BitPatron is going to solve the censorship problem that Patreon and other platforms are facing. The key to solving this is decentralized power!

In our business model, the content creator is always in control.

Solution Principles

• Creators own and control their data, which is saved in an encrypted storage bucket of the user’s choice.
• Creators own their subscriber list, and can’t have their audience taken away or censored by BitPatron.
• Multiple payments gateways, consisting of Bitcoin and various traditional providers are directly linked to the content creator’s accounts, thus the content creator doesn’t rely on any powerful payment provider, nor on BitPatron for payments.

Solution Overview

This decentralized business model makes the content creator immune to censorship.

As an example, let’s imagine a situation where PayPal attempts to censor a content creator by withholding service:

As you can see from the infographic, even though PayPal could block a content creator, payments wouldn’t drop to zero and revenue streams would be only partially impacted. Content creators could motivate their user base to switch to another gateway or to fully immune Bitcoin (BTC) payments.

Even in the very unlikely case that a content creator is blocked on BitPatron (BitPatron will only block users that breach existing laws), BitPatron would have only limited power and impact.

As you can see from the infographic above, content creators wouldn’t appear on BitPatron’s front-end anymore, but payments, content and user identities of existing followers would still be safe, secure and accessible by the content creator.

Technical Overview

Decentralized encrypted content storage

By using Blockstack technology we are able to offer secure and decentralized content storage hosting. Blockstack ensures that all exclusive content is encrypted, signed and verified, so users can treat storage providers (like Azure and Amazon S3) as “dumb hard drives”. The cloud provider has no visibility into the user’s content; they only see encrypted data blobs. Users can take their data with them if they leave BitPatron, since it was never with us in the first place. You can read more about Blockstack Gaia technology here: https://github.com/blockstack/gaia/blob/master/README.md

Bitcoin as a censorship-resistant payment method

We will offer Bitcoin on-chain and Lighting Payments, allowing a direct payment link between content creators and users, completely cutting out middlemen and middlemen fees, as well as obtaining a truly uncensorable payment option to monetize content.

Multiple Payment Gateways

Users can connect their own payment gateway accounts, such as Stripe, Paypal, Adyen and others and start accepting credit cards. By not relying on only one gateway, they can easily switch between providers in case of unnecessary censorship from one of the providers, and ultimately they will still have Bitcoin, the only censorship-resistant payment option. This drastically diversifies financial risks for content creators, while still being able to offer convenient credit card payment options. Furthermore, neither credit card companies, nor payment providers will be able to put pressure on BitPatron, as we simply have no control over payment streams ;-)

To get early access and help us shape the future of free speech, sign-up at https://bitpatron.co