A little over a year ago my Bitcoin spirit guide, Trace Mayer, started talking about this idea of hiring Bitcoin. The suggestion was that bitcoiners should focus where alternatives are lacking or non-existent. While competition around payments and remittances is quite strong, Bitcoin has no serious rival as a currency that cannot be debased or in which transactions cannot be blocked.

Rein started then as an idea to apply Bitcoin’s strengths to freelancing. By combining digitally signed statements with uncensorable payments, this idea could mean safer, more efficient, and larger scale projects while minimizing risk. Rein could mean better use of wealth generated by Bitcoin and more opportunities for people to enter the Bitcoin economy.

Today, we’re using Rein to build itself.

The first alpha was command line only. We used it to do a first real-money job. This was followed by Tor support a couple months later and most recently, Rein got a UI. Since we’ve entered this dogfooding stage, we have a few jobs in-process and according to our roadmap, the project will generate many more. Two jobs that we’re looking to fund now will be in the 0.5 to 1.5 BTC range, a sort of sweet spot where Bitcoin fees are minimal but it’s still worth using multisig for protection.

From a high level Rein is an attempt to convert funds into progress. Over the next year, we hope our success is noticed and that other projects can also turn funding into results. If you have bitcoin and work to get done, we’ll be happy to help you get started.

In terms of development, 2017 should see us improve safety by adding reputation. We’ll work to improve privacy through encryption and robustness through decentralization and i18n. We’re also starting on a mobile application to bring Rein to more people.

Getting the project to this stage has a been a lot of fun and we’re looking forward to all that 2017 has in store.

#Rein on freenode IRC — github.com/ReinProject — reinproject.org