A new bitcoin-dedicated site called Yumcoin is offering content creators the chance to sell their wares in exchange for the digital currency.
The service, launched last week, allows creators to sell their digital goods online, in exchange for bitcoins. Software, music, videos, ebooks and plugins are listed among the products that can be sold on the site.
Users sign up for free accounts, and the service allows them to upload digital products to sell at a maximum price of 10 bitcoins. The files are stored on an Amazon’s cloud service. Sellers can then enter a product description, and choose an image to describe the product. Yumcoin gives them a product URL, which they can then share on Facebook or Twitter. Opening the URL gives the user 20 minutes to scan the QR code containing the payment bitcoin address and buy the product.
The site takes 1 percent of the sale price, plus .0025 bitcoins (around 25 cents at the current value) as a commission on every sale. Users provide just an email address and password when registering for the site, and they are able to nominate a bitcoin wallet whenever they want to withdraw their balance from Yumcoin. The site publishes a policy listing content not permitted for upload, including the usual suspects: obscene material, counterfeit items or digital content that you do not own, along with personal information.
Yumcoin’s site is sparse — with no “featured product” directory — presumably because of its recent launch. At present, it appears to be offering a minimum viable product, Eric Ries-style, although more seems to be in the works.
“There’s lots of new features we’re working on (ie. catalogs, storefronts, and analytics),” the company stated in an email to CoinDesk.
For now, however, the main innovation seems to be the production of dynamic bitcoin addresses tailored for each product, which are shareable and scannable.
Book publishing service Cointagion offers a variation on dynamically generated bitcoin address QR codes for digital product sales. That service uses information about a user’s browsing session to dynamically generate its QR codes. Scanning and paying enables the customer to download the digital product on offer. There’s a white paper on that here.