About 7 months ago, I demonstrated an early version of Burnable Payments (BPs) in an ether-burning stunt. Of the 15.5 ETH invested in four BPs, 6.5 ETH was released to workers for infographics and technical support, 1 ETH was burned, and the rest was recovered (for BPs which were never committed to by workers).

See a detailed writeup of how it all went here, but the short story is this: two payments worked, and I was able to contract services “from the Internet” without regard for whether a marketplace existed for my requested services. Once exposed, the BPs attracted the workers without any further input or work from me. I recovered the funds from the two that found no workers.

In one case, I opened a BP and left the computer. When I came back less than 12 hours later, a worker had committed and offered a solution. Shortly after, he implemented it and I released the payment. I know of no other system that offers such effortless outsourcing of work.

Today I’d like to invite the community to begin using Toastycoin Frontier, where you can create your own BPs and search/interact with the pool of all BPs. You’ll need Metamask or some other web3 provider. There are some informational links on the top-right that explain in more detail how to use the system.

(The Burnable Payment contract itself has undergone some minor changes, but the major behavior is unchanged.)

There are very few applications on Ethereum that have non-Ethereum-related, immediately practical utility. Toastycoin, however, can make this claim, while using extremely simple smart contract logic and absolutely no supporting infrastructure other than a web3 interface. No ICO, no company, no server, no license — and it works today. All hail game theory!

At the moment, I have a bit over 4 ETH spread over 13 open Burnable Payments. Some have do with improvements to Toastycoin (get in here web devs!), and others are a bit sillier, aimed at testing the limits to the Burnable Payments concept in general. Feel free to comment here with questions on any open payment you see from me (0xFCe18…). Just to give you a taste of what’s there:

- Javascript method to sanitize and apply markdown formatting to a piece of unsafe text (0.3 ETH)

- Spraypaint an Ethereum wizard (0.5 ETH)

- Make a email-notification server for BPs (0.6 ETH)

- Write a Haiku about Burnable Payments (50 mETH)

I invite any crypto-barons to throw down some money for work they’d like to see done, keeping in mind that the ether is recoverable so long as no one commits, and you can set the service deposit as high as you like.

(Protip: etherscan.io has a “watch list” feature. This is what I use to get email notifications of actions on my Burnable Payments, until a more specialized tool is developed.)