I was thinking a little bit about some of the initial data analysis service nodes could do - perhaps prior to some of the grander ideas or later down the road as a fun-ish project - and I think it would be rather interesting to analyze bitcointalk traffic / posting patterns. Maybe even formulating a method for determining leading indicators to and or predicting price movement. It could be based on frequency of posts in a particular forum topic, keywords that have been posted, and even taking other more disparate data from different sources - such as recently published articles, twitter trends, etc. It could provide value to traders or people on bitcointalk looking for cool coins to follow.
I've been thinking about this all day.
I guess the USP that we will have is ServiceNodes hosting Bitcoin full nodes. Very few people will be able to get hold of that data or replicate it, even though its open source, so we can set the market rates for the data.
Anything else, anyone can do. So it becomes a race to the bottom in terms of fees you can charge. Someone would quickly do it for free - just because they can.
Looking back at my initial thought process, I didn't see it as much of a means of driving revenue. I saw it more as a means of getting the word out about Spreadcoin & our services. Building something for the crypto community, which will help with something everyone (I think to some degree at least) cares about - making money in this space. I imagined a sort of buzz and dialogue about different coins under a somewhat constant updating stream of data feeds - like the Poloniex troll box - except instead of being driven 100 percent by coin shillers, there is some degree of backing to the analyses (although maybe there could be a troll box under the data lol). Of course others could probably replicate it, but it could be a great way to get people to see that the data we are providing is useful and valuable. Even if it wasn't an initial project, it might just be something fun to do in the future to flex (and get some tinder dates?
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Honestly, I didn't think much about how proprietary data drives the value of the resulting analytics. Though it makes complete sense. If we are able to build a strong network, find a way to obtain useful and valuable data from BTC and then produce a user-friendly portal to utilize/consume that data, we have essentially cornered the market, while being decentralized! If anyone attempts to copy the process, they would need to be able to produce a stronger & more valuable network - needing to incentivize people on the network to run a greater than or equal amount of (Bitcoin) nodes to the number Spreadcoin has. And who would initially join a smaller network if revenues aren't nearly as inviting? It seems to me, as you have probably alluded to before, that once this little snowball starts rolling, it will grow and grow, attracting more development, new ideas and a whole slew of other great things!
