👪Beneficiaries
Share some of your proceeds with other users or parties
Overview
As a starbeam.one artist you can assign people who receive a percentage of proceeds generated from every sale and resale from products that you publish. These parties are known as beneficiaries of your products. This section describes the motivations behind this feature and how to configure your product to do so.
Motivations
The original design of starbeam.one was based heavily on the immutable nature of the blockchain. Additionally, there is an unknown quality of Bitcoin that allows one to unlock a transaction by programming a riddle into it. Usually, this is done by setting a hash (large number) to guess, and this process is the computationally expensive and controversial operation that Bitcoin is notoriously known for. However, Bitcoin also has a language built around this mechanism so you can create any "question" (riddle) you like around a transaction, and the person with the "answer" then gets the value of it.
This is a compelling feature, and one that was adopted into starbeam.one with its beneficiary features. Namely, the beneficiary does not need to be a member of starbeam.one to start collecting proceeds (they do need to be a member to claim them, however). The artist only needs to know the beneficiary's social media identity or other "proof" to tag them and divert proceeds to their account. When the beneficiary joins the system and proves they own the associated proof, they gain access to the account and the value stored within it.
Intended Audience
Who makes a good beneficiary? As a general rule, it's anyone who inspired the product that you are publishing, or perhaps inspires you in general. This can be a "muse" or someone who is the subject of your work. It could also be someone who helped you along the way, a mentor, a teacher, or someone in a similar role in your life.
Other Candidates (Marketing)
While the intended, original audience envisioned comprised of the above, a later revision add the ability to add random current and future users of the starbeam.one system as beneficiaries. This can be seen as a marketing feature to introduce yourself to other members of the starbeam.one system. What better way to introduce yourself than to send them a percentage of every sale and resale of your product?
Supported Identification Methods
There are several supported ways of identifying a beneficiary. This system walks through the various types.
starbeam.one Users
You can choose one of the following:
Current user by member number
Current user by username
Random Current User
Random Future (next 100) User
Public Identifier (username)
Using the username/handle of a user on a public provider is another method to locate a beneficiary identity. Usernames are publicly available and therefore verifiable via an address via URL. The following providers are supported:
Twitter
Reddit
DeviantArt
Manually-entered
Finally, there are manually entered identities. For the alpha, only email-addresses are supported. Note that only the SHA256 hash of the email address is stored for verification, not the email address itself.
Walkthrough
For an example of how to add a beneficiary to your product, visit our walkthrough that will take you through the process.
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