The Satoshi Gate is a new way for Bloggers to monetize their writing.

It is a WordPress plugin that allows you to collect very small, easy to make payments from your loyal readers.

It works like this.

When a user comes to your Blog, she is presented with a fresh Bitcoin address to which she may send a ‘Satoshi’ (the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin).

Once she sends the Bitcoin, The Satoshi Gate plugin does the following:

It records a hash of the IP of the visitor, and puts it in the DB against the Bitcoin address that was generated for this IP and this visit and/or this page request.

The Satoshi Gate plugin checks the blog owner’s running instance of the Bitcoin client to see if/when the payment is received.

After the payment is sent, a cookie is set and this user/IP is allowed to read the article, or is allowed access to the blog for a day, week month or in whatever way the access policy is set in the Satoshi Gate preferences pane in WordPress admin.

Satoshi Gate gives you the following advantages over other payment systems:

• Free to download and use
• No recurring use fees
• Instant install
• Easy to configure
• Super small transaction fees
• Super small payments
• Unobtrusive to the readers of your blog
• No third party involvement
• Collect your money in realtime, no monthly payouts
• No risk

The Satoshi Gate allows you to specify the way you divide up and serve your content in a fine grained way.

You can run your Satoshi Gate in tip mode, where a small, vey mild floating nag box appears to one side until you tip to remove it. You can set teaser posts, or give people the first half of a post only, the rest being unlocked by a Satoshi. You can allow them to read three posts for free, then pay for the fourth. You can create flexible post bounties where an entry will be released to everyone for free after a certain amount of Bitcoins have been received… and those are just a few examples of some of the cool marketing strategies you can create and mix and match with the Satoshi Gate plugin.

Because you can ask for extremely small payments for access to your blog, no one will begrudge paying you, and if you are a good writer and have thousands of visitors, or perhaps a blog post that goes viral, it will be possible to collect significant amounts of money.

You can of course, set your Satoshi Gate to collect any number of Bitcoins, including ‘pay what you want‘ not just the smallest denomination.

The Satoshi Gate is quite naturally, open source, and will be available through the WordPress plugin site.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 12th, 2011 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Money, Post Tipping Point, Software, Wishware.