Add Agora username registry and PDS-as-a-service revenue paths

ideas/passepartout-economics.org

@@ -1333,6 +1333,63 @@ scale (compute marketplace, certification, hardware, migration).
 The switching costs compound. The network effects are positive sum.
 The market is nearly a trillion dollars.
 
+***** Additional revenue paths
+
+** Usernames on Agora
+
+The DID system is permissionless — anyone generates their own DID
+via HD key derivation. But human-readable @handles (short names,
+common English words, three-letter IDs) are naturally scarce. The
+early player controls the namespace registry:
+
+- **Free tier:** any DID can claim a namespace.username on a
+  first-come, first-served basis with proof of key ownership
+- **Premium tier:** short names (2-3 chars), common words, brand
+  names, squatter prevention via auction or annual lease
+- **Revenue model:** $5-$50/year per premium username, auction
+  revenue for highly contested names (single-letter, common
+  surnames). ENS-style: registration fees fund development, not
+  speculation.
+
+At scale: 1M premium usernames at $10/yr average = $10M/yr
+recurring. The namespace registry is a natural monopoly — the
+early player's registry is the most widely accepted, so every
+new user registers there. Network effects lock in.
+
+** PDS as a service
+
+The Personal Data Store (the Merkle fact store exposed on Agora)
+can be self-hosted (free, AGPL) or hosted by the early player:
+
+- **Free tier (self-hosted):** full AGPL PDS, runs on any Lisp
+  host, full control, no cost
+- **Basic hosted tier:** $10-$20/month, 10GB fact store, 10M
+  queries/month, automated backup, automatic upgrades
+- **Business hosted tier:** $100-$500/month, 100GB+ fact store,
+  unlimited queries, SLA, dedicated relay, compliance logging
+- **Enterprise hosted tier:** $1,000-$10,000/month, air-gapped
+  appliance management, dedicated support, regulatory-compliant
+  data residency, integration with existing SIEM
+
+This is the classic open-core SaaS model (GitLab, Sentry,
+PlanetScale). The free self-hosted version drives adoption and
+trust (you can inspect every line). The hosted version captures
+the value from users who value convenience over control. Bluesky
+already demonstrated demand: they charge ~$10/month for PDS
+hosting with minimal feature differentiation.
+
+PDS as a service is lower-margin than hardware appliances but
+higher-volume. Target: 100K subscribers at $15/month average =
+$18M/yr recurring, with near-zero marginal cost per additional
+subscriber (the symbolic engine is CPU-bound, not per-user
+metered).
+
+Combined with premium usernames: $10M/yr + $18M/yr = $28M/yr
+recurring from Agora services alone before any compute marketplace
+revenue. These are not speculative — they are standard internet
+business models (namespace registry + SaaS hosting) applied to
+a decentralized identity and data layer.
+
 *** The full triad: Logos, Stoa, Agora
 
 The self-driving Lisp Machine is not the endpoint. It is one