Edgecase is willing to accept several alternative forms of subscription payment. A Bitcoin fee will usually still be charged, but it may be greatly reduced.



1) Access to a Bitcoin-based service that you own and/or operate.

This service should be a useful addition to the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Examples:
- A service that analyses various aspects of the Bitcoin blockchain.
- A service that accepts signed Bitcoin transactions, broadcasts them, monitors their status, and sends a notification when a transaction has been mined and is 6 blocks deep in the blockchain.
- A service that offers Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for the first-pass extraction of plain text from PDF scans.
- A company that audits computer hardware and publishes the results.
- A company that sells audited computer hardware.
- A company that takes responsibility for a specific piece of software, e.g. GPG, maintains and improves it, tests it on various pieces of computer hardware, and publishes the results.

Edgecase believes that:
- Bitcoin-based companies that sell software services should charge an annual subscription in Bitcoin.
- An annual charge enormously reduces the overhead of building and maintaining a complex billing system.
- A subscription model is the best approach to managing the enormous complexity cost of maintaining software.
- Bitcoin is the most secure way to accept payments from the entire world, does not permit chargebacks, and will probably become the global currency for, at minimum, the market in software and software services. Additionally, and most importantly for its continued existence and utility, its scarcity makes it an attractive store of value.
- In the event that Bitcoin breaks catastrophically, its replacement is likely to be a newer, more robust version, rather than one of the old national currencies.

Even if a service already exists, you should still consider the possibility of building and operating a similar service. Companies go bankrupt, people die, natural disasters and war are ever-present dangers, and thus Edgecase believes that the most resilient path forward into the future involves multiple separate instances of every software service, widely distributed around the world. Edgecase is willing to subscribe to multiple suppliers of the same software service in order to reduce its exposure to the risk of the disappearance of any one supplier in particular.



2) Carefully prepared plain-text versions of particular documents.

The choice of document should be mutally agreed upon by the prospective client and Edgecase. Please do not choose and prepare a document without consulting Edgecase.

Additional factors that should be agreed upon prior to any work:
- the extraction method (e.g. scanning + OCR, format conversion)
- the text encoding
- the editorial quality (e.g. the number of proofreading passes)
- the degree of typesetting

If the document is particularly long, a section of the document may suffice.

Examples:
- A chapter of Lombard Street by Walter Bagehot.
- A mathematical proof of the validity of the RSA encryption algorithm, with worked examples.
- A chapter of the Bible (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or English).
- A chapter of Eothen by A W Kinglake.
- An essay by George Orwell.
- The Nature of the Firm, a 1937 paper by Ronald Coase.
- On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (Latin).
- A section of The Iliad (Greek, English).
- Historical documents concerning the development of the Lisp programming language.



3) A technical project report.

The choice of project should be mutally agreed upon by the prospective client and Edgecase. Please do not choose and embark on a project without consulting Edgecase.

Additional factors that should be agreed upon prior to any work:
- the text encoding
- the editorial quality (e.g. the number of proofreading passes)
- the degree of technical proofreading
- the format of the project report
- the degree of typesetting

Examples:
- Compiling Bitcoin on a particular piece of computer hardware.
- Testing some aspect of Bitcoin on a particular piece of computer hardware.
- Patching Bitcoin and testing the result.
- Compiling GPG on a particular piece of computer hardware.
- Testing some aspect of GPG on a particular piece of computer hardware.
- Patching GPG and testing the result.
- Compiling and testing a particular web server.
- Testing the capabilities of a particular hardware component.
- Reverse-engineering a particular firmware driver.
- Examining a leaked piece of NSA malware in order to find out how it works.



4) An analysis of some aspect of a language, with worked examples.

The choice of topic should be mutally agreed upon by the prospective client and Edgecase. Please do not choose and prepare an analysis without consulting Edgecase.

Additional factors that should be agreed upon prior to any work:
- the text encoding
- the editorial quality (e.g. the number of proofreading passes)
- the degree of typesetting

Examples:
- The reflexive in Spanish.
- The use of qui and que in French.
- The cases in Russian.
- An aspect of the evolution of Latin into the various Romance languages.
- An aspect of the evolution of Anglo-Saxon into English.