Massive Business Opportunities hidden in the NXT Blockchain.

And possibly others..

Any blockchain allows to exchange valuable digital tokens and to time stamp information… “really?.. but how can this be profitable for my business ?” — should you ask!

I have been thinking about it for more than 3 years now, so I believe I found several profitable ways blockchains can bring to you. But.. sorry, you will not get a straight answer, because.. I do not know your business!

So you will have to figure out yourself what to exactly do, but I’m sincerely going to help you by portraying blockchains capabilities (and more specifically NXT) from the entrepreneur point of view.

My goal is to make you see the beneficial overlaps that may exist between your market and this disruptive technology.

Ready to Dive With Me ?

Blockchains are, without a doubt, part of the most important innovations of the past 8 years. Their main feature is to allow the recording of “transactions” into various opened worldwide peer to peer ledgers that can not be tampered nor censored.

The meaning of the data written into these ledgers makes all the value to its users, so, understanding it, is crucial for the “visionary” entrepreneur.

Exchange of Value

Unless you are dealing with people having huge difficulties with their own national currency (which I agree, will happen soon or later to any of us), or unless you are dealing with the alternate currency niche, offering to transact with crypto-coins will only have a marginal effect, it has not been mass adopted and then it is not going to help you make more sales.

However, the coin transaction feature, allows you to do things that were not possible before. These possibilities may represent space of opportunities that could not be considered simply because the technology was not there :

Open Ledger: Sending money transparently such that the world can easily audit transactions is great for marketing. New potential partners (and even customers) can see that transactions are occurring. It increases their willingness to experiment such a transparent, and controllable business deal. This feature can also be exploited by charity funds, fair trade, loteries…to clearly show how the money flow. Remember, it is not because you transact with blockchains that the world has to know everything you transact (blockchains or not) about.

A blockchain will put light on parts of your activity that you were previously forced to run in the shadow.

Even if you honestly report what you do with a bank account, why would people believe you? In the future, there could be a shift in your customer mindset, or more precisely in the mind of your market opinion leaders, making them prefer companies who bring transparency versus thus who don’t. This may occurs within 5 years or less, so it is not exaggerated to start meditate about this topic right now ! This is, at least, an interesting edge to establish yourself faster as a reputable business when you are dealing in areas where a “long term reputation” is almost necessary.

Laser targeting communications: Using the knowledge you have on each customer in your communications with them is a well know trick that facilitate sales naturally. With blockchains, the most obvious answer you can get without asking is: is my customer rich? or does he transacts a lot? You have no certitude on maxima, as one can always have multiple accounts/addresses, but it is, at least, an information at minima that your customer is providing you (consciously or not) with.

It will be beneficial for the evolution of your relationship if you can adjust your upsale offers with some knowledge on your customer.

In the future, big data analysis services on blockchain could also help you draw a lot more details on customer profile from a simple payment. Marketing experts could even consider re-targeting advertising services based on blockchain profiling information..

Accountable relationship automation: Operating guarantees openly and even automatically is sometimes possible. On SecretMiner, an online shop for vanity accounts that I made, I have a script treating product delivery based on incoming transactions but since the product delivery also occurs via the blockchain, I have another script, runing on another computer, checking all past transactions. If it detects something wrong, it sends all the coins back to the customer. Then, I can claim, on the order page: “Ordering is safe, if something goes wrong, you will be refunded automatically, you do not even need to ask !”

The “all in blockchain sale process” certainly helps to rise confidence of the new clients.

Another use of this blockchain visibility could be to offer people to pre-order with only sending a blockchain message, and they will then be accountable to pay once their order is ready to ship. If they do not pay, in practice, you may lose a little… but they will loose something too since then, anyone who wants to know, will precisely learn that they did not respect their promise.

Loyal customers could be offered many easy ways to order from you while others would always have to “show the money first”.

You could also imagine that a service provider directly check your customers activity (he can check incoming transaction to your sale accounts) to operate its own service. Or you, as a service provider, could work for sales operators without the need of them telling you what to do more than : which account to watch.

Reputable informations: NXT offers a “datacloud”. This is a way to publish 43Kb of information via the blockchain. This information is hosted by all the nodes during 21 days and then it is pruned, which means that only the hash of the information remains in the blockchain. Some volunteers nodes (archive nodes) may still have the information from which it can be retrieved. But, in all cases, the author, or anyone for which the information has importance can store it individually to ensure it remains available. As long as someone as an intact copy of it, he can prove when it was published and by who.

So, if an account has established his public reputation, anyone will now have a very high confidence that the communication published in the data cloud comes from the exact same source, and anyone will be able to prove what this source published at that time.

A source publishing this way engages itself in a long term commitment to do an honest job and the longer it does, it capitalizes on a trust record.

A concrete opportunity for this is for instance to develop a reputable source for torrent documents. But any news media could capitalize on a long term trust construction.

Strong Partnerships

Messaging through a blockchain can be the same as signing a contract, but it is also quite different since the party are pseudo-anonymous by nature.

Contracts New dimensions

In the world of contracts and business opportunities, only your imagination is the limit. But now, you gain a new component to think about:

The internet is available 24/24 for a party to sign any contract and for outsiders to verify contracts integrity!

These contracts can be private or public. On the NXT blockchain, the private contracts can also be disclosed to a third party (hence become public) very easily without revealing more than what is required.

The contract can be signed between real identities or signed between anonymous parties, or between a real identity and an anonymous one.

Enforcing a contract based on blockchain evidence, although not yet a common practice, can become straightforward, once an identified entity declares, in the classical legal way, let’s say on a notarized paper, that it recognizes its responsibility for what it does in the blockchain space, anything that follow in the blockchain space is a direct acknowledgment of his responsibility .

Starting to play

You can set up things, offline, or online trough any social media/ email / forum, and then grave things for ever by sending blockchain messages. Or even with using a free notary service on blockchains.

However, once you start to considers contracts, every detail counts. Because in the end, the contract will either be used by some program, for which everything must be perfectly understood and in control, or by a judge, from which you do not want to hear: “your contract was not good enough !”

So, in order, to build the great idea for your business, you must perfectly visualize every details of your process. You must go crazy with looking at any potential fail, because otherwise, your cheating opponent will “naturally” find the way.

You will have to make sure that the party understand what they sign, and make sure that what they sign proves that they understood.

If you set it right, contract based on blockchain messaging, can really help you to develop an excellent and very strong business reputation, not only made from word of mouth but it will be blockchain proved !

At some point, this long opened reputable history, may be the best capital any business could own.

Global Collaborative Endeavor

Extending the partnership concept to the higher level yield to global collaboration . Whereas it is to run a simple club, a company (profitable or not) or even perhaps a town, the NXT blockchain looks very well suited, to organize decision making by a wide group of pseudo anonymous actors.

NXT as a business structure

With its account control feature, that can limit outgoing transactions to the approval of N out of M pre-approved accounts, or holders of a minimal amount of some “colored” coins, and with its transaction types dedicated to voting, messaging, data cloud, phased transaction and account tagging, NXT seems quite equipped to organize governance in very transparent ways.

Think about election, public consultations, declarations, vote conditioned operations that can be organized, right now, directly from the NXT client.

Those high level management transactions are very importants, so they require the highest quality for both security and transparency, but they are also not very frequent, which is ideal for the blockchain technology which is still limited in terms of transaction volume!

Today, my own practical experience on the subject is weak, since only a very few projects are being run this way. A lot more endeavors should now be carried out before we get a large picture regarding group managements via decentralized internet networks.

But for the first time in history:

The perfect tool is here, only waiting for us to play with!

Joining the Club

To start thinking & play with this kind of mechanism on a real situation, I recently decided to join a club, built on the NXT blockchain.

The club creator wrote his idea on a forum, set up only one rule of the club : a monthly/yearly subscription for which he has set up an account address where members can pay.

From that simple post, the club was created and opened. Isn’t it beautiful ?

I have no idea if this club can do what it aims to do (grouping people who do not want nuclear hasard), there are marketing issues that are not addressed at all, but I just found the idea so brilliantly simple that I decided to pay the subscription fee for a year.

If you pay, you are part of the club. To know who is part of the club, the world only needs to query the blockchain to check the transactions received by the club account. If it was a political party, your transaction would prove you are a member and would allow for income tax deduction. At least, you can get the list of all anonymous accounts that joined. Once the club grows, it could be decided, for instance, to have a board of directors that have partial or total control on the funds collected by the club (NXT allows to organize that).

The club could issue assets and give them, for instance, to those who really identify (since knowing the real people of the club would give the required strength to influence the real world with its ideas). With these assets those people could gain some special voting weight. With a website checking for Nxt token identification, some informations concerning the club could be made available and restricted to members only.

The club could have multiple asset types for various parts of its activity, to organize decision making in various departments.

The board of directors could label some accounts with some tags that others members would then recognize in order to provide some intermediate hierarchy to optimize some activism activities.

Publishing on the NXT cloud tag, could be enough to publish the rules of the club, and if the 43 KB limit is too small, a hash with the link pointing to a document giving the same hash, is good enough to notarize any kind of document. And once some users download it, and make it available to others, these rules will become decentralized as well.

The Anonymous Graal

The amazing thing with NXT is that it fits very well to be used as a transparent universal record that you can use to enforce legal responsibilities but at the same time, it reminds, that from efficiency perspective, an anonymous mechanic is much more attractive.

To use the blockchain as a trust network that will prove the actions of the participants, you only need to ensure you work with known individuals. But this produces a strong marketing friction because your participants then have to sign a legal contract, and you will have to ensure they do it right. This is like if new comers have to climb a high barrier to start with, which is the perfect recipe to increase conversion costs. So, only high rewarding activities can become profitable to be run that way.

So, the incentive to look at fully anonymous solutions is quite strong.

Because with full anonymous processes, you already have the complete structure ready, which is also very easy to start with.

Use light wallet, buy some Nxt, and your customer/partner is ready to go. What then remains difficult, is to make up your business mind on how to benefit from this variety of transparency while still allowing your “contacts / participants” to remain anonymous.

To be honest, this is still what remains to be well established but we have already some tracks to follow and perhaps experiment.

Anonymous Business Investors

There is a market for anonymous things. Right or wrong, there is a crowd of people who are almost religious regarding anonymous businesses. That makes a niche that you can serve.

Those anonymous fanatics are willing to invest in your business even if yourself remain anonymous. Although it depends a lot from what they “know” about “you” and the trust that goes with (“you” being the anonymous one or the real one).

Cheaters resiliency

If you can make it such that it costs a lot more to the cheater than the reward a cheater would get, you do not care one remain anonymous.

If you can make it such that it costs more to the cheater than the sum of the loss its will produce to its victims, there may be a path to develop, little by little, a growing confidence between anonymous parties that would not be worth for cheaters.

Here we will start to dream about reputation system. But the perfect one does not exist yet. It is even not conceptually though. Everything that exists today can only partially help. But, what is now available, that was not before, is that voting, liking, downgrading, can become costly, whereas it is by direct or indirect fees. All the votes can then be openly audited and new inventive ways to attribute voting rights can also be experimented.

There are reputation system that could not exist before that can now be experimented.

Imagine that some work by new members and recognized as legit by existing peers is required for the new member to be able vote on others works…

The study of mafias or Freemasons governance structures could be an interesting starting point to elaborate some models to experiment.

Think at peers communities whose members have to perform work approved by “higher rank” members to get ranking. In such systems, damage made by a bad member may naturally be restricted to remain sufficiently lower than what it costs the bad member to be in the position to make some damage. The probability of high damage could become sufficiently low such that a fully anonymous system remains in all case attractive for the participants.

I’m pretty convinced that once we will start to see some anonymous community management structure acting on very real stuff, tons of duplicates will be set up at light speed on all kind of subjects.

Now What ?

What if you implemented one of the suggestion above? Who would you become for your market ? I believe you would be the one who started revolutionized it. And your branding would naturally explode!

Because even if your experiment would not directly become a pure financial success, it would give you for ever a creative reputation that no one would contest in your niche.

How much a such a reputation can be worth to you ?

To learn more about NXT

Good to now: NXT will soon give birth to Ardor, a scalable solution with integrated child chains.