Designing an experiment in payments

Testnet bandwidth payments are on schedule to start next week, but I won’t be surprised if it’s the end of November before they are stable enough for real world testing to begin. With truly autonomous payments there’s a lot of edge cases with wallet and channel management that you have to answer correctly.

Ideally we want to work on figuring out how to present and design bandwidth payments from a human perspective in parallel to the technical completion.

So we came up with a quick and dirty idea that lets us perform a small scale experiment in our of our test networks.

The payment channel transactions aren’t quite ready but we do perform bandwidth accounting correctly. So instead of turning that into a transaction and sending it to the blockchain we send it to a server. From there we can pay users in our Clatskanie test network for bandwidth by hand.

It’s not exactly elegant and doesn’t really work well at all unless you have people on the ground. But it does allow people to be confident they will be paid for expanding the network and make money installing nodes.

Which is all we really need to observe what motivates people and iterate on how we present bandwidth payments and Althea to real people as a product to use. Not just a technical curiosity.

Some interesting lessons learned already, as we prepare to roll this out next week.