Electrum is both an open source project and a company (Electrum Technologies).
I created the company in order to:
- distribute the software through a legal entity.
- provide support for corporate users.
- accelerate development.
The monetization ideas you listed in your post are not original, and have been considered already. The company is currently earning money on consulting, and on the Trustedcoin plugin. A few other monetization ideas are in development.
I have been contacted several times by VCs who wanted to invest in Electrum (the company).
After several inquiries, I have decided not to follow that path, for the following reasons:
- I believe that software quality is generally better when people write it for fun, than when they are getting paid for it.
(it is not a question of competence, it has to do with long-term commitment to fix the things you do wrong.)
- I would not be having fun if I was working for VCs.
- I believe that the Silicon Valley model of development (grow fast, pay investors later or die) does not suit well Bitcoin.
- As far as the company is concerned, I prefer organic growth. (maybe it has to do with your typical Bitcoiner's debt aversion syndrome).
What's wrong with the Silicon Valley model applied to Bitcoin? Well, despite what you can read in various Bitcoin media, Bitcoin's growth is comparatively slow. (I mean, slower than companies like Ebay, Facebook, Amazon, etc.), because its userbase grows slower. I believe this is because people are generally more conservative with money and savings, than with signing up on a social network. As a result, the competition between Bitcoin companies is more a marathon than a sprint race. What Bitcoin needs is long-term commitment, and not companies that go bust when they are out of VC money.
When it comes to using funds, there are 3 things where Electrum could benefit from money: development, servers, distribution.
1. Development:
First, your observation that development is slower today is wrong. You are not seeing the whole picture; development effort is not proportional to the number of commits or visible features. Most of the Electrum software has been developed by myself and developers doing this on their free time. Other parts of the code have been developed by external companies, or paid developers. I believe paid development should be funnelled to the aspects of the code that are not handled well by developers working on their free time.
2. Servers:
Currently there is no shortage of free servers. The new server code (ElectrumX by kyuupichian) has made it much less resource intensive to run an Electrum server.
Paying servers have already been discussed. So far nobody has been running a paying server successfully, because of the competition of free servers.
I think it will be possible to have paying servers once we have support for payment channels in the client.
3. Distribution & packaging.
This is something where money can be useful, because it is typically not very exciting for developers working on their free time. This is the primary reason why the company was created. I hope to be able to hire someone this year, btw.
I see, well good luck with the job, so far Electrum has been an amazing wallet, and I hope it keep being the same way.