Blockchains and Freelancing

As usual I have been unbelievably busy. I still make time to help out other developers using steem-js when they ask but I haven't been very active because of two major projects I have been working on. One of those projects is not really my place to talk about until I get the go ahead since it involves paid work I am doing for others. The second project is my brainchild and what I want to talk about today.

I have worked as a freelancer and hired many freelancers and the process has always been very painful from both sides. I was driving from Baltimore to Florida when an idea hit me about how to build a freelance site that is better than what is out there. I'll be revealing more details about the site over the coming weeks as it gets closer to a beta launch but I wanted to cover a few things that I have found interesting in the process so far.

The current giant in the field is upwork and I am not a fan. I liked eLance when it was around before it was swallowed up by oDesk and the new beast was renamed upwork. At first I was just interested in using one of the new decentralized freelancing sites that are in the works but eventually I soured on that too. My problem with decentralized sites is that I think people need to take a step back and say does this thing really need to be decentralized. Now when it comes to payments and escrow for freelance work I think decentralized is a great idea. When you start getting into all of the other functionality of a site like that I really don't see the benefit.

One site's whitepaper actually stated that it could take minutes for a form to submit because it was waiting on the blockchain. What kind of user experience is that. So, as I hinted above only payment related items will be on the blockchain for my site. Currently I am using a smart contract running on ethereum although, I will be keeping a very close eye on SMTs to see if they can be added at a later date.

One big problem that I needed to solve was spam. The big players in the industry have teams of people that review for spam and their sites are still littered with it. My solution involves financially punishing spammers while empowering regular users to help rid the system of spam and get paid for it when they do. I will go into much more detail about this in a future post.

Another issue was funding. The ico market is insane and I would rather avoid any imperial entanglements. I am raising a small amount of money privately but I will also be selling a utility token once the site is live. The plan is to set aside a number of these to sell at a deep discount to early adopters. Please note that these tokens will in no way be a security. They are for spending on the platform. More about these later.

If you hire or freelance then please keep an eye out because the early sign-up will be launched soon and I would love to have my friends from steem join up. I will also be hiring some freelancers of my own to help me out since there is still a lot to code.

Dan
@voorash

Image courtesy of pixabay