Qbux Token

The QBUX Ecosystem

QBUX is a utility token to power a global ecosystem of web-based content and software. Participants in this ecosystem profit for two major reasons:

Near-zero marginal cost of making a copy
Extreme re-use of and deduplication of work

As more and more software and content is widely shared, used and monetized, costs for everyone go down, due to these reasons. The QBUX token economy is designed to foster a free market of hosting solutions, software developers, content publishers, and communities that want to provide a great experience to connect and empower their members, without reinventing the wheel building their own software, content, or hosting infrastructure.

The QBUX token ecosystem is also designed to reward collaboration. It can finally help monetize open source software and content through a combination of cryptographic signatures, copyright licensing, and economic incentives.

Web Development Today

Companies want to deploy websites and apps to serve their users, so they pay software developers to build various solutions, and then pay hosting companies for servers and other infrastructure to be made available.

The developer may use re-usable components, but usually the end-software is exclusively licensed to the company. Although the company could license copies of this newly developed software to other companies around the world, in different languages, they aren't in the business of software licensing and distribution. And although the software developer could also make money from distributing the software solution more widely, there is no standard solution for the client and vendor to engage in profit sharing, and software distribution. As a result, a lot of work is duplicated around the world, until some SAAS company winds up hosting everything on centralized servers, controlling the whole platform and extracting rents. This is how we arrive at centralization: Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube are just some examples.

Decentralizing Web Development

The QBUX ecosystem is a generalization of the above scenario. It provides a distribution system for web apps and digital media content so everyone can benefit from software that was already developed, as well as photos, videos, articles, journalism, and more. In order to make money selling software or content, a vendor will need to partner with a hosting solution, payment system, and distribution network. The QBUX ecosystem will already provide all this, so even though the software is freely available for anyone to host and use, each participant is heavily incentivized to participate in the ecosystem. They can focus on what they do best, and let the rest of the stack be provided by other participants in the ecosystem. The result is a web-based ecosystem with massive re-use and collaboration, where everybody wins and wealth is spread widely.

Gamification and Rewards

Another aspect of the QBUX economy has to do with the economic relationships between the community which spends QBUX, and its users. The community may extend trustlines to users in order to let them try some features for free, or to reward them for regularly engaging or bringing new users onto the platform. Ultimately, the trustlines are represented by internal credit balances that need to be "topped" up by the user, either by certain actions, or simply by paying the community with QBUX or fiat. At the end of the day, most of these internal credits are redeemed by users for the same types of things that have near-zero marginal cost of copying. (Software, digital media, content, digital goods, etc.)

Services

A major focus of the ecosystem is on monetizing software and content that has been productized, and has very low marginal costs of deployment for additional clients. However, it can also support service businesses that have not yet productized their service, or simply provide ancillary services to customize software, manage communities, moderate user-submitted content, and so on.

In this case, QBUX would typically be used like Groupons, able to cover some portion of the bill with the rest paid in fiat as a "co-pay". QBUX obtained in various ways can thus be used to obtain discounts on various services. Just like with Groupons or ticket sales, customers may be throttled — there may be limits on how much of a service a customer can use. Instead of breakage through unredeemed coupons, unspent QBUX can be spent by clients on other services, or re-sold to others similar to how StubHub allows resale of tickets.

Distribution and Discovery

At first, Qbix Inc. will be the largest developer of software products in the ecosystem, but as other developers build atop the Qbix Platform, it will become more decentralized. The marketplace of available software and content will have many different participants, but the initial distribution and discovery will probably be through Qbix apps such as Groups, which has already attracted over 6 million people around the world, in many languages and countries. Communities will be able to deploy the software they want for their members, and customize their experience, without all the hassle of dealing with software developers and hosting companies.

Reputation and Dispute Resolution

Developers, Hosting and Service Companies may be required to stake some QBUX tokens with a QBUX marketplace (such as the ones operated by Qbix, Inc.) in order to be listed there. That will enable customers to discover and connect with them. Each marketplace can have ratings and reviews to manage reputations of vendors and clients. In a typical marketplace, as vendors attract more simultaneous business to their linked wallet, their reputation grows, and so do their QBUX staking requirements. The staked QBUX are essential to effectively resolve disputes over service refunds, as well as for incentivizing transparency about how many transactions the marketplace has led to, which resulted in mutual satisfaction.