
Ask HN: Help me generate an idea for my next project - chocolatejb
Ask HN: Generating ideas for my next project.<p>My previous one was [CryptoMilli](https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cryptomilli.com). In the back of my mind, I want to work on a single page app with the ethereum blockchain as the backend.<p>With the amount of energy it generally takes, I want to at least work on something worthwhile. That&#x27;s why I&#x27;m giving myself a week or two to evaluate a bunch of ideas, choose one and ditch the others. (Dating a bunch to find out which one I could fall in love with, at least until it&#x27;s done).<p>Any pointers, suggestions will be highly appreciated.
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a_bonobo
Make a digitally verified lab book

It would be kind of a wiki but each update/edit is externally verified.

In science, each lab has several lab books where everybody documents
everything they did. In the rare event of a patent discussion between two labs
or unis the first entry in the lab book decides who gets the patent (it seems
to be way more complicated than that by now). Usually these lab books are
regulary counter signed by the supervisor to 'prevent' tampering but it's not
a particularly secure system. Having the blockchain verify each entry's date
and originality could be fun. (but I wonder how useful it would be in the real
world - would patent lawyers take this up or just ignore it and say they're
happy with the old system?)

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hentrep
In my lab experience, electronic lab notebooks were incredibly bloated, slow,
and buggy to the point of being unusable. I’m most familiar with what was in
place at Merck about 8 years ago: ELN (Electronic Lab Notebook). I agree with
comments that the countersignature is both lax and absolutely necessarily from
a records perspective. Most importantly, building a new lab notebook system
would require importing data from whatever it is you’d be attempting to
displace. Lab notebooks have significant roles in IP disputes, and it would be
critical that the contents and timestamps are preserved.

To underscore how terrible ELN was at our site, many managers instructed their
reports to keep traditional paper notebooks, photograph each page, and upload
to an ELN entry. Countersignatures were then performed on the ELN platform.
This was at a relatively small Merck site, and maybe the issue wasn’t as
pervasive elsewhere.

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j_s
Build an ethereum contract (or verify and use an existing one) that refunds
all money received unless a 'goal' is met, like a 'guaranteed money back if
useless' GoFundMe.

Allow people to submit ideas that you're willing to vet completion for (this
gets tricky/arbitration-y, encourage splitting this up into phases/steps
rather than a giant lump sum) like an 'only pay if you get it'
Kickstarter/Upwork.

With a twist: find a way to use all the pending deposits for proof of stake
and return most of what is earned to those who have committed to potential
projects. Consider making your own transaction fee equal to the ethereum
transaction fee for all your transactions.

I may spam a couple more as separate comments...

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ThomPete
First find a problem, then think of the obvious solution to that problem, then
solve the underlying problem to that solution.

You can find some good problems from this essay.

[https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-
problems-4...](https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-
problems-47ee63bb3511)

~~~
chocolatejb
Thanks for sharing ThomPete I read the article. I will go through the HN
thread link you pointed out in a bit.

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pavlov
If you’ve decided to use Ethereum, you should find a target group that really
needs the immutability and verified consensus. For the average user, Ethereum
is both very expensive and very inconvenient.

So maybe look for industries where they’re currently moving a lot of paper
around to achieve consensus between market players and/or regulators?

~~~
chocolatejb
Thanks a lot for the suggestion Pavlov. I will let this float in my head and
search/read more about some use-cases.

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apexkid
Design a polling system for media houses to use when they conduct opinion
polls for a particular topic. Making it decentralized and blockchain backed
will ensure truth of data and make the results tamper proof.

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anotheryou
I got a pet project in concept stage :) Very experimental though, no
guaranties at all it will work:

A mix of link aggregation and twitter (taking the best of both worlds) and
than adding hierarchy by ratings from the link curators. This hopefully means
avoiding suggestion engine clickbait, and democratic mainstream kitten
pictures. It's always the 1 to 1 trust of subscriber and curator. This also
goes away from timeliness and chronology.

Further experimental features:

\- adjust your subscriptions by dampening or raising certain curators
weighting

\- meta subscriptions: Subscribe everything someone else subscribed to (with
dampening when there are too many nested hops). Should take viral to an
extreme (for good or bad).

\- see each post only once (flip or scroll to the next page and it becomes
permanently archived for you)

\- nested folders and subscription based on folders (splitting personalities
and allowing to split topics. In combination with meta-subscriptions one could
subscribe to accounts of resort editors to make a "magazine")

If you are interested, I wrote a few pages about it I'll happily share.

~~~
tylergetsay
I am working on a system like this for music, (scans links on YouTube Reddit
SoundCloud etc) I'd be interested in reading what you have. My email is
tylergetsay@gmail.com

~~~
anotheryou
I'm currently editing it a bit, I'll send it in a few days (feel free to
remove your address from the comment, I saved it).

I also think such a system is well equipped for matters of taste, where some
peer-bubbles can even be beneficial (there is so much bad art I never want to
see...).

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j_s
Find a way to break the metadata chain connecting Tor users to onion servers
on the Tor network. Most specifically the 'logged in here, connection happened
on the server discovered there' edition.

Not sure ethereum is good here vs. privacy-first alternatives, but also not
sure if all that is needed is Mechanical Turk, or a Stallman-esque browse-by-
email. Maybe a protocol where people can get paid to run an email re-mixer as
an onion service?

Build a system where users get paid to click random buttons, invoking services
on onion sites. The hard part would be preventing side channel attacks... same
request length, truly randomizing delay between task submission and completion
(or some sort of subscription to send a block of random data regularly but
sometimes it's user-controlled), no permanent logs vs. getting paid, etc.

Riffing on a few useless ideas here on a low-traffic day since the ideas are
not going anywhere without execution.

~~~
chocolatejb
I am not that familiar with Tor. Maybe someone in this thread will experiment
with this idea.

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j_s
Implement microtransactions. This is a good 2nd business (for mixers!), where
you have existing customers who might be willing to pay a bit extra to be able
to support their favorite creators. It gains extra potential if you act as an
exchange, giving a currency that has a solid history of cheaper transactions.

You might gain additional leverage by being willing to collect for people who
aren't connected, but that can get awkward (allow donating to charity). Also,
taking care of getting funds to designated recipients who want nothing to do
with ethereum basically​ means the legal setup reporting money transfers.

I think the window for this is closing as some mainstream currency is going to
do this right, or some cheap-transaction currency will become
mainstream/accessible enough.

I am posting ideas as separate comments. Hope the weekend crowd can give you
something useful.

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chocolatejb
Summary of submitted ideas:

* Digitally verified lab book (a wiki style update/edit verified by 'signing parties') [a_bonobo]

* GoFundMe-like smart contract [j_s]

* Polling system for tamper proof results on opinion polls (for media houses) [apexkid]

* Trend Analytics of crypto-currencies on platforms such as Twitter/reddit. [AznHisoka]

* link aggregation + hierarchy of ratings from link curators to avoid suggestion engine clickbaits and sockpupetts inflence [anotheryou]

* Micro-transactions for existing customers who want to support their favorite creators. [j_s]

Good suggestion:

* Read/listen/watch to learn the basics (in a domain) in order to unleash your creativity [fazkan]

Thanks everybody for your time and consideration. At the very least, I wrote
down more questions of my unknowns, what-ifs, and basics to read/experiment
more with. This means a lot :)

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fazkan
Common man you dont want others ideas, just practice writing 10 ideas a day
that can solve some problems. Dont filter while writing.

Also word to the wise, if you are asking other people for ideas to implement
in a space (ethereum) so that you can learn the technology, implies that you
dont know much about the field or have clear basic concepts. For now I would
just read/listen/watch to learn the basics in order to unleash my
creativity...

your sincerely, nobody...

~~~
chocolatejb
Thanks for the advice. Going back to the basics is almost always a good idea
before forcing down the trees. Will do.

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thinkingemote
Do what interests you. What are you interested in? Fish, sports, books,
travel, food etc. Choose a domain first, then select something to apply to
that.

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spobin
You may have meant 'domain' as in an area of interest, in which case this is
good advice. For years though, I was a proponent of the 'buy a domain name
first' method of idea validation. As a result I spent far too much time and
money on domain names when I should have been testing the idea/market.

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AznHisoka
Trend analytics on how often the various cryptocurrencies are mentioned in
Reddit.

Sensible price alerts to prevent people from obsessing over their stock or
crypto portfolip (ie an alert for BTC is in the 12k range as opposed to a
daily price alert)

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fwdpropaganda
Make torrents editable. (eg. one torrents contains discography of a band. band
releases new album. torrent owner adds one folder to the torrent which gets
distributed to all the peers).

Someone will do this, mark my words.

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orionblastar
Find a problem that does not have a solution yet. Make a solution to solve the
problem and offer free for life licesenes to companies that want to beta test
it and give feedback and bug reports.

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chocolatejb
Thanks for the input Orionblastar.

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baccredited
Find a way to overlay an ERC20 type system on top of a zero fee coin like XRB,
IOTA, or other. Not what you asked for but I'd love to see it!

