An Alt Internet needs an economy. It needs to attract entrepreneurs and people looking to buy things. This is how an alt Internet can fund its own construction.

An important goal for IXIT is to bootstrap its own crypto market in a way that's cheap, relatively low-tech and easy to replicate. So basically the opposite of something like Silk Road. I propose a model for doing this where you only need to know how to use a crypto wallet and spend a lot of time growing your community. It's best to adopt a feeless crypto like NANO for this purpose.

Whichever crypto you choose, peg its value at a price that's way higher than its market price. Maybe 0.00001 NANO = $1.00 USD for example. In order to build an online community that uses this crypto there has to be something to use it FOR. It needs to be something that demands very little time and effort and trust, like gamifying things that people already do for free anyway.

Some examples:

* File-sharing
* Information-sharing (same idea as quora or stackexchange only way less formal)
* Favors (ie: can someone translate this caption for me, photoshop something for me, etc)

The idea is for people to charge what they would in real life, but on the assumption that 0.00001 NANO = $1.00. This creates a low barrier of entry for people to participate since they can easily scrape up the crypto they need from faucets. But don't peg the price too high. Set it so that faucet "mining" equates roughly to minimum wage in time investment.

Since the money being used is worthless anywhere else, it remains circulating within the community. People continue to find new uses for it as trust in the currency grows. This also comes with long-term incentives baked in; if such a community were to grow large enough it would exert an upward influence on the "real-world" market value of the crypto-currency. Those hundredths of a NANO you earned would begin to pay dividends.

> but nobody would ever do that
People already spend thousands of hours earning and trading in worthless currencies on MMORPGs. A whole black market emerged around game currency because of it. This can be translated into other contexts outside the world of gaming. Just "gamify" other things that people do for free

> but this would commercialize everything and ruin the culture of online communities
There will always be gift economies, voluntarism, free file sharing etc. Just the fact that anyone would raise this objection is proof of the demand for these kinds of online spaces. The commercial model I've proposed can exist on its own boards or informal networks. It could even exist symbiotically with social spaces as long as you have well-defined rules in place.