In this article, the Afro-Tech is going to show how we can architect an urban-based blockchain solution that allow brothas and sistas get a side-hustle quickly up and running selling digital media in the physical world. We are going to discuss the background of how old-school Internet pin delivery codes worked, creating a more modernized approach using the blockchain, example use cases and how to implement this to help you brothas and sistas get your side hustle up.
Kossier + Fooky.com is currently private beta testing a pin delivery blockchain system and the photo above is a real-world prototype of the beta project. How this all got started was I was going to a socializing event here in Atlanta and there was a sista pushing a box of her self-published books from her car to the vendor section and she was cute to me. I thought it was a better way to get cash from self-publishing versus waiting weeks for the physical books to be printed and then shipped back to sell books out of boxes – that’s physical inventory that has to turnover before working the next book is created. That’s self-publishing printed books is slow money an an outdated practice and the Afro-Tech is going to use the blockchain to bring cats like that cutie ATL self-publishing author to the 21st century and get the cash up quickly.
We will discuss the photo above in detail later in the article and later, the top photo of the vending table will make sense to you – another thing about the photo of the vending table and the cash – I don’t do cash drawers or cash register anymore when vending so I like to just keep the cash I’m collecting from customers on the table and I use my mobile phone as a paperweight to hold my money down.
Understanding Prepaid Card and Pin Codes
I’m pretty sure many of you purchased prepaid cards at the store and let’s go through the process.
You Pick the Prepaid Card from the Rack. The card is not activated; it just has a code that has to be scratched off to be revealed.
You Take Card to Check-Out. The cashier will swipe the card on their cash register point-of-sale machine to activate the card for you to redeem later.
You Activate the Card. You have to go to a web site or enter a code or use your phone and follow an IVR prompt to complete activation.
Merchant Pays the Cardholder. The merchant settles the card purchase by paying the prepaid provider and it’s usually 30-60 days later before it reach the vendor in the form of some check or whatever. This is slow money also.
There are many types of prepaid cards that allow you to purchase airtime on a prepaid phone, access video game credits, get gift cards and purchase digital media services like Netflix or Hulu.
Pin Delivery system are similar to how prepaid cards work but is used to activate software or access subscription-based web services. So, if you remember buying software and they ask you to enter a serial key, that is how a pin delivery system work. Let’s talk about how the software version would work.
Pin Delivery System Create Serial Keys and Pin Codes. The pin delivery service generate a bunch of pin codes or serial keys, sometimes millions of them and store them on the database to be validated later.
Digital Buyer Purchase Software Pin Code or Serial Key. For a web site, the pin delivery service accept a credit card payment online to purchase a license to software and then return a pin code or serial key. Digital River was an old-school name if you created software and sold it as an independent developer. Also, if you purchase something like PlayStation or Xbox or a digital subscription from Amazon.com, they give you a serial key – this is the same process.
Digital Buyer Enter Serial Key or Pin Code. The serial key or pin code is entered into an activation box, what happens next is the software or web site contact the pin delivery system to validate if the serial key or pin code is valid.
Digital Media is Activated. If the pin code or serial key come back valid, the software will execute a process to unlock or the web site will grant access to the paid web service. If you haven’t figured it out by now, this was how p0rn web sites and online casinos operated back in the 1990s since they could not take credit cards directly. In a way, the government saw it as money laundering since you can mask the
The problem with the pin delivery system is the serial keys were already created and assigned to the first person who can validate them. So this created hackers who build “crackers” software that would brute force guess the serial key of software and then sell the unlock code or just publish online. Cats would then sell on eBay a copied CD-ROM with the cracked code. Also, some prepaid cards had this problem and we blogged about it – the serial key was already guessed and cracked while the card was still in the plastic and when someone poor activate it and deposit their funds, a hacker can pull out the funds immediately and no one knows what happened.
It’s important to know this background because this is what we are going to use to create a system that allow you to do the same thing to sell your digital media. But we are not going to repeat the same flaws and come up with something better. We want a system that have more secured pin codes that has to be activated by the merchant and a backend system that will verify and activate the card. And we will use the blockchain.
Blockchain Approach
The blockchain allows the ability to offer the same pin delivery service but in an enhanced way using a cryptosystem platform. I want to break it down so you can understand how it technically works.
The Blockchain Will Hold the Pin Codes. There will be about 500 million initial pin codes seeded on the blockchain and are encrypted. The blockchain is a shared database so everybody can access the same blockchain and unlock pin codes as needed. However, it is up to the pin delivery system to define the value/scope of the pin code in question.
The Pin Delivery System Will Claim Pin Codes to Offer to Vendor. The Pin Delivery System is a service that can offer the vendor pin codes in advance to offer or dynamically pull the pin codes on demand. This has to be balanced correctly. For example, if a trap artist has a song release and a launch party signing in Bankhead area of Atlanta, he would want thousands or millions of pin codes available to sell on launch date. If someone has digital fashion design files to sew fast fashion at home, maybe they just want one-off. Either way, it cost money for the pin delivery to claim a pin code off the blockchain as they buying it wholesale to offer vendors.
At Vending Event, The Digital Buyer Will Offer Cash or Credit to Purchase Digital Media. The buyer will give the vendor cash or process a card. Then the buyer will do this – they will activate the pin code with their mobile device and give the pin code to their customer. The customer can redeem the code and then their digital media is available to download.
The Pin Code is Registered on the Blockchain as Redeemed. The pin code is registered using the digital buyer public key to encrypt on the blockchain if they are on Kossier. If not on Kossier, then the pin code can basically be redeemed by anybody but this is a good thing – that means you can give the pin code to someone else as a gift to download an e-book, right? See, you seeing real opportunities right now, ain’t you?
So what you see accomplished is the blockchain is a shared ledger holding the pin codes and is unlocked using cryptology – this is the cryptonomics we are bringing to the black community and the hood to economically empower our people. This allow brothas and sistas to offer the same prepaid cards and gifting prepaid cards to gift each other digital media services or download their own digital media. And it allows cats to create white papers, e-books, lookbooks, podcasts, mixtapes and sell them at vending events in the black community and take cash or credit and receive their money fast and turn around quickly and produce new digital media keeping black media flowing in our communities.
Business Opportunities to Hustle On
We already named several ways brothas and sistas can use this blockchain pin delivery system to side hustle and get the cash and nightly sweeps into their bank account but let’s go over a few ways so you can get an idea of the possibilities.
Repackage Blog to Paid Access. Instead of having a free blog and pay-per-click ads, how about you repackage the articles to more premium content as PDF white papers, backgrounders, how-to and offer them for sale? That’s what I’m going to do with Dream and Hustle when we switch over to story mode.
Trap Artist Underground Launch Party. A trap artist can record their track and vocals in the studio and then release immediately by activating pin codes at the launch party. There is no need to be waiting weeks for mass manufacturing CDs or other stuff – just have pin codes for people to download the song, get the money back fast and move to the next trap track to release.
Create PVC-cards for Vendors. You can make the cards for the vendors and distribute the cards to stores around the hood for people to buy. You probably can get the cards into major chains to compete with InComm, the major firm that sells prepaid cards. Or if you been to Costco or Sam’s Club, you saw those cardboard boxes where you take the cardboard thing that can be taken to the register to purchase a product that is not on the floor, here is an example – http://www.creativedisplaysnow.com/retail-specific-displays-for-costco/
Create Pre-Sale Event. Someone can create an pin delivery bot that operates on a pre-sale basis that let customers buy the digital media in advance, like a song. This could be a music label startup using the blockchain. The money is held in escrow and when the artist deliver, the song is distributed and the funds are paid out. If no, the money can be refunded back to those who purchased. This is done in the video gaming industry all the time.
Instead of listing dozens of examples, let’s talk about the revenue model. The blockchain will be initially seeded with 500 million pin codes that will sell to pin delivery systems wholesale at 5 cents a pin code. That’s $25 million worth of assets filling up around 32GB of data – yeah, maybe that why you should have done STEM, right? The pin delivery system will probably mark up the pin codes to .75 to $1 per activation depending on the type of digital media or digital service they are dealing with. The vendor will have to price the cost into the pin codes into their digital media offering. But the entire ecosystem allow vendors to take cash, but have to order the pin codes wholesale at $1 a code, the pin delivery orders the pin codes from the blockchain at 5 cents a pin code so everybody gets to eat good from the setup.
And one more thing – this is yet another Afro-Tech production that can easily be ported to China, India, Africa, Latin America, Europe and so on beyond the hood. It is just pin codes so this is universal worldwide service. So that 500 million pin codes can be easily used up from worldwide digital media selling and the blockchain will just generate another 500 million to sell and keep growing from there. I mean like..isn’t the blockchain so damn cool?
Case Study: A Self-Published Author E-Book Table Vendor
In our demonstration setup, we are featuring someone named Choe J who created a coming of age e-book that contains poetry, matter-of-fact prose and pictures to give a visual interpretation of how Choe transformed herself from not knowing her place in this world to finding her story and defining her purpose by traveling and experiencing moments around her. Choe is just like all of you out there – she wanted a way to get to market as an entrepreneur but didn’t have a way to publish without the upfront cost of mass-producing physical books as well as front the cost of marketing and distribution. So she turned to the pin delivery system and is collecting cash that she can take to the bank or go buy her some clothes and shoes the same day.
Can somebody tell me what they noticed about the vending table setup we created? Yes, you see digital screens and no brochures and that’s close but there is something cooler than that. What you see is the ability for me to dynamically table vend anybody digital media on those screens. I can sell Choe J book in the morning, then sell access to someone else blog later and then offer downloads to someone upcoming album using the same digital vending platform. All I need is your marketing media to place on the big screen and the small tablet is used to share with the customer such as in this case, a sample chapter from Choe J book is on the small tablet the customer can swipe through before making a purchase.
To sell to customers is simple and straightforward and cool. All we have to do at the vending table is we take the cash or process a card payment using Square as you see in the photo. Then as you see in the photo above is the mailing labels where one is a list of pin codes that are QR codes stickers with the number on the bottom. The second labels are business cards that will be torn out and it says “Thank You for Your Purchase!” and instructions on how to redeem the code to download media or activate access. These are Avery Templates and I printed them out using Word and they did come from our beta pin delivery blockchain. What you do next is you scan one of the QR codes and activate it live – or you can activate all of them live before the vending event to avoid manually activating them (you can deactivate them later). Then you peel off the QR code sticker you activated and stick it to the back of the business card and what you created is a ghetto prepaid card.
Do you realize what is the coolest part? Did you realize all you have to do is setup global distribution of your digital media by sending Word files of your labels and they can print it out and setup a vending booth on your launch date? You can setup pop-up events in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, London at the same damn time. Do you realize this is yet another nail in the coffin for multi-level-marketing? Because a bot can create smart contract functionality that pays instant commission on the prepaid sale once the pincode is purchased or redeemed. There is no longer a need for a downline. In fact, bots are so advanced, a bot can be created that list “gigs” in Japan to have someone print out these stickers and place your marketing material in Japanese on the vending digital screens and sell your Japanese version of your e-book in Tokyo for the First Fridays event where black ex-pats do a monthly meetup. Bots can automatically find workers to hustle your e-book worldwide, that’s the Fourth Industrial Revolution world we live in right now, homey.
Blockchain pin delivery is currently in beta but we expect to have more information soon as we work out the details of how to deliver the service. We are very excited at the ability to help brothas and sistas side-hustle their digital media works for cash at vending tables and events in the local black community but then again, we are the Afro-Tech and this is what we do.