I woke up thinking about how people pay for free stuff all …

I woke up thinking about how people pay for free stuff all the time and they like it. If free mint is a meta then it seems like paid subscriptions to creators who distribute profits to members and who do giveaways for those who subscribe would make sense as well. This could be done with locking; Lock-to-pay or a PayLock.

A PayLock is a commitment of Bitcoin in a locking contract where the unlocking address is changed to a different person’s address other than than the address of the one who locked up the bitcoin.

PayLock is also the name of an app that is kind of like Patreon but with locking and bitcoin. Rewards for Plocking are distributed by Creators to their supporters in the form of access, free mints, airdrops, or Bitcoin.

You lock-to-follow but you PayLock to support. This way you can capture the signal of locking as well as committing to financially support artists, educators, builders etc. Creators can set their PayLock price. Creators can create tiers of support the same way they do on Patreon.

In exchange for the income provided to the Creator, members can receive exclusive access to free mints, airdrops of assets, or Bitcoin from the proceeds of assets sold. Examples would be: artists giving access to free mints that could then be sold on secondary, distributing proceeds from the sale of a 1/1 artwork, doing giveaways etc. For educators they could grant access to courses, community pages, live calls, calendars of events etc. For developers they could use the money to support their work and then monetize their creations and distribute profits or grant early access to Plockers.

On the PayLock app, Every PayLock commitment is also a lock-to-mint event. Plockers receive a Time Token which goes along with each month of support. Every x amount of blocks a new time token is issued to new PayLocks. These tokens go to a specified wallet where the benefits for supporting are distributed to. This allows creators to know where to distribute assets, access, and profits. (Maybe there is a more elegant way of doing this like just distributing to the addresses that originated the PayLocks).

Creators can distribute rewards to anyone who ever supported them, or only to addresses that are currently supporting them.

Members could commit far into the future or go month by month depending on the reputation of the creator, and expected value of rewards.

Reputation is another signaling mechanism on Bitcoin that is captured negatively by PayLock subscriptions, but has the potential to yield positively for Plockers.

This allows bitcoiners a way to fund projects or specific Creators and benefit from them as well. The more value provided to the network in general and to community members specifically, the more people will want to support them with PayLocks, the more consistent a creator’s track record is the longer people might be willing to commit to lock into the future but most will opt to support on a month by month basis because if the creator ever dies or ceases to provide value then members could withdraw their support.