Update
4 Jumada al Thani, 1435
4-4-14
Bismillahi Rahmani Rahim,
Asalam Aleikum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh,
Dear shareholders,
Thank you for your patience in waiting for this update.
Assets
Cash - 13.12217619 BTC
6.6 retained for website development
Income from Nasty seats since last dividend- 0.0739076 BTC
Donations - 0.75 BTC
Total Dividend Payout - 0.8239076
As for some of the projects mentioned in the last update- I was hoping to get some interest from shareholders in these projects but I didn't hear anything. These projects are also probably too ambitious considering our personnel and budget restrictions. However, our income is dwindling because I have not had much time to do lending. I lent to several people who did not repay loans, but this was with my own money, not IBB's. This was good, since I learned a lot about lending at my own expense rather than IBB's.
As I mentioned in the last update, I think we should still be focusing on lowering barriers to entry for the Islamic world into the bitcoin ecosystem. Right now the main barrier to entry is education. That is why I think it is important that we focus on information. Writing tutorials and faqs on bitcoin is a good service, and we can also derive advertising revenue from these services.
Another idea, which is more within the scope of our capabilities right now, is to provide a multilingual bitcoin news service. The aim is to get more people interested to learn about and use bitcoin by providing news articles in their native language. For this purpose I propose hiring translators to translate select articles to the languages most spoken by Muslims in the world- Arabic, Persian, Malay, and Urdu.
A bitcoin faucet may also be a means of boosting revenue. I suggest making this faucet a social service by motivating people to run the faucet to operate the faucet by answering trivia questions that remind the user of useful knowledge. The user would be rewarded after answering a series of questions with a small payment of something like .00001. On each page with the question, there would also be a number of ads.
So to sum up, I am suggesting building a website that provides community service with 3 aspects- digital currency education, digital currency news, and a bitcoin faucet that dispenses bitcoin in exchange for mental exercises that increase knowledge. This is beneficial to all parties- people increase in knowledge, the IBB collects ad revenue, and the advertisers get increased exposure for their products. A project of this scale is within the scope of our current capabilities, while wallet services and exchange services are not.
We will have to fill a number of positions.
- Web designer for setting up the website and the faucet
- Translators for adding language support for multiple languages to increase our traffic
- Regional representatives to promote the IBB website in country or language specific forums and chatrooms
- Loan officers for managing micro loans
Loan officers will have to be volunteers who could take a percentage of gratuities. They would be provided with a small amount of funds from the IBB which they would then disperse in smaller increments to borrowers. Any donations that the IBB receives for this public service could then be split, 50% to shareholders, and 50% to the loan officer who made the loan. This entails risk, so the loan officer would have to be reputable or come recommended by a trusted shareholder or member.
To increase publicity and get people using our news services, we will also be issuing and handing out IBB secure cheques with a small amount of bitcoin to encourage people to get bitcoin wallets and to learn about using bitcoin.
After much thought, this is the best plan I could come up with for increasing our revenue. Any comments or suggestions are very welcome. If anyone is interested in any of the positions listed above, please send me a PM.
Thank you for your patience and I apologize for the delay!