yafujifide

There is a way to fix this. Don't just require a 6 digit code. Require a 6 digit code and a long random string (an expiring token), which is only present on the page the user visited, or in the email they were sent.

I have been programming for almost 30 years. I am extremely delighted that with one line of clear prompting I can generate 10+ lines of completely accurate code. It is very good at replicating patterns. IMO, this is the greatest advance in IDEs since intellisense. I estimate I am about 2x faster at programming than before. I would never want to go back to a world without it. Why not use it? Because all of your code has to go over the internet to a large corp who promises not to use your software against you? That risk will be solved over time with open-source, local LLMs.

No they don't. See the link posted by the author:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/11adab39e6019935aa3a...

Full nodes validate a lot of blocks at initial sync, but not all of them.

I think you misunderstood that sentence. Full nodes validate new blocks, but they don't validate all historical blocks at initial sync.

We suspect that is not the real Stefan Molyneux. We will have flagging and moderation to deal with this soon. Also we will allow more auth options so people can prove who they are (twitter auth, e.g.)

Thanks for your great comments. We launched the beta only three weeks ago so it is definitely rough around the edges :) Fixing issues as fast as we can.

Also, does anyone know what kind of regulatory upkeep a project like this requires? If a site like this operates with multiple currencies, it's essentially an exchange and probably has to register as such (they've outsourced this). However, if it just keeps user balances (not really a bank, but similar), does it have to register with any particular authorities?

We have discussed with lawyers and are sure to stay inside the law. Because all payments are p2p and we are not a custodian, the regulatory burden for us is a lot lower than many other similar projects.

edit: your site allows a blank password, the title is "Yours | undefined" on profile pages and the menu controls to the left of the message input are very unintuitive. How do they work? Also, the profile ids are from hell:

Will fix soon. These things are already on our issues list :)

Awesome article. Thanks for sharing.

This is our first voting model. We have other models planned for favorites, liking, etc. May the best model win. We are always focused on high quality content and will make sure that's the case :)

We will have multiple mechanisms for votes, likes, favorites, etc. May the best mechanism win :)

Thank you. Hopefully we can pull it off. We have a great asset - very low fees while not being a custodian of user funds. Allows rapid iteration of the product with fewer regulatory concerns.

1) How many total and active users do you currently have?

About 2800 total and 1000 daily sessions.

2) Where are they coming from?

Predominantly social media.

3) Why would they pay to participate in a new social network when there are so many available that are free?

Because we encourage high quality. They believe in our mission and our content quality is rapidly improving.

4) Why Bitcoin Cash?

Low fees. See this article: https://www.yours.org/content/a5c9a2549cfd9e48607e0aebe233d2...

That quote caught my attention. Is this kind of gambling or being a day trader? I like the mechanic that unearthing good content gets rewarded -- was that the goal? Have you found this system subject to gaming or collusion (a few people posting and upvoting content to increase the odds of getting a payout)? Do you see less clickbait getting upvoted than, say, on fb? What's the incentive for later readers to upvote an already popular title?

The vote model encourages hotness. If you want to earn money, you are encouraged to vote quickly. We will have alternate models to encourage different things soon. The next step in rating content will be something we call reviews. After purchasing content, you will be asked: "was this content worth paying for? yes/no". We believe the information we get from that will be a very good measure of quality.

Pretty cool that you taken such a different approach. Wish you the best! I'm pretty much burned out on all social media, but will check it out regardless.

Thank you very much!

edit: Big question what's your vig or house cut on all the money changing hands?

Currently our revenue comes from two places: The 10¢ it costs to post content and getting the first vote on all pieces of content.

2nd edit: I see the answer to my last question: you keep $0.10 from from each post and credit yourself as the "first voter on every post". So you get the largest cut of the cost of the upvotes on each post?

Yes. This is something we will change soon, probably by either giving the creator the first vote and then charging 20% of all votes or by giving the creator the second vote. It's important that Yours Inc. gets some of the money to prevent infinite self-upvotes. We had that problem originally.

If there were 0 fees on Bitcoin Cash, the payout to earlier voters could be arbitrarily high. It's a divergent series. Because of tx fees, there are limits. BCC has low fees, but not zero.

You know you are an earlier voter by looking at the amount voted. That is the amount below the vote button.

Spam is exactly why we turned on the 10¢ to post. Cleaned up the spam pretty well :)

We will allow subcommunities soon which will allow moderators to pick the cost to post. Low-income countries can use a very low value denominated in their local currency appropriate for those users.

Ideally we will partner with Coinbase. They already have a credit card widget for Bitcoin and Litecoin. Tell them they need to add support for Bitcoin Cash :)

If not Coinbase there are a number of other providers we can use. For global adoption, we will ultimately partner with many third parties simultaneously for this service.

Yes! We have not done and ICO and don't intend to until we can do it the real way - by putting our company equity on the blockchain, allowing it to be traded globally p2p. That will require a lot of work legally for that to be possible. No rush - we'll do it when the time is right :)

Also, on the friction of Bitcoin Cash, note that we currently have a Shapeshift integration allowing you to cash in with any crypt, and will support credit card onboarding soon. We think most users won't even know they are using crypto :)

We think that might be true. We're very market-minded and intend to give our users the power to set prices wherever possible. We'll let the natural price arise.

This is a great point. But many of these services do not let you withdraw easily or at all. On Yours, you can cash out instantly. Even if the company goes away, you can export your keys and cash out even then :)

Thanks very much for your input.

We're very focused on creating money-earning opportunities for our users. Every time you pay you should either get some thing out of it or have an opportunity to earn money.

For creators, if you write something worth paying, you can easily generate more than the 10¢ it costs to post. If you charge 10¢, you only need one payment to earn your money back :)

Don't worry about it - you can already cash in with any cryptocurrency using our Shapeshift integration. And soon we will have credit card onboarding so you don't have to worry about acquiring crypto at all :)

Note that our app has a built-in Bitcoin Cash wallet, but it works well enough that you don't necessarily realize you are using crypto :)

Hey everyone, Ryan X. Charles here, Cofounder & CEO of Yours. Happy to answer any questions.

If you plan to start a company that centrally hosts content (which you said below the user's would do.. now Im confused), whats the point of even using bitcoin?

The point of using bitcoin is so that users are rewarded both for sharing content, and for hosting the content.

What role does it play besides some sort of integrated pay to post and tipping system? Both of these things can be done without bitcoin -- and far simpler too.

Although the idea I sketched out is for a decentralized reddit, a centralized reddit that just integrated payments is also totally valid idea. Imagine if Changetip were integrated directly into reddit so that upvoting tipped people. That would still be really valuable and a lot of people might use such a thing. But it doesn't solve the other problem of what to do when the owners of the service have different ideals than the users. (Note that I actually worked with the guys at Chain.com to produce a proof-of-concept of something like this.)

Just create an altcoin that you have more control over. But I guess that no one (you?) would benefit enough, because its not tied to bitcoin's value being inflated.

A new altcoin would not be as useful as bitcoin outside of the system. Using bitcoin makes karma as real as possible. Using an altcoin would just be annoying and a lot fewer people would want to use the system.

If there are no downvotes, does community moderation work? Does this even resemble the Reddit we know of?

This system would not be the same as the reddit of today. Whether moderation would still work - see all my other comments in this thread about flagging. Basically, flagging would serve as downvoting and would be partially effective. Would love to find a better way, but flagging may be good enough.

At some point to run a business you have to participate in the economy. The way you do that is be getting things you can use to trade for other things. Usually we use money as a way to simplify this.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with bitcoin, but you can buy real stuff with it. It is quite well integrated into the normal economy at this point, considering how young it is. But of course it is not as popular as credit cards yet.

How do you extract value from the bitcoin ecosystem, until there are enough people willing to exchange good for bitcoin, like food, clothing, and shelter?

You can buy food, shelter, and clothing with bitcoin. Spend some time around /r/bitcoin and you will see these opportunities. How many places could you use a credit card when they were only 6 years old?

I think that's just proving my point. There would only be a few people participating as full nodes because it's complicated, putting the entire network at risk of a bad actor.

A p2p network where anyone can run a node seems strictly better than a central organization to me with respect to "bad actors". When reddit, Inc. makes a decision the users agree with right now, they can't overturn admin decisions. It would be far easier to do so with a decentralized reddit.

That's great but how do I find the content I don't agree with?

I'm not really sure - most of the time you probably wouldn't know, so there would be times when you unintentionally hosted something you disagreed with. One way to solve that is to simply not host content at all, and only download.

Who would flag it? Can I trust them?

This is the general problem of reputation, trust, authentication, and naming all in one. I think this project should aim to solve these problems sufficiently well to make things work effectively, and not solve them 100%. For instance, flagging could work by having a buddies list, and trusting their flags, and maybe their buddies' flags. That would be partially effective and better than nothing, but not perfect either. We would iterate and improve the flagging system with time.

None of the federated social networks integrated p2p payments because that wasn't possible until bitcoin. The entire existing internet economy was built around the assumption that p2p payments were impossible. That assumption no longer holds.

If you have a reason to be suspicious of some content, don't downloaded it. If you discover some content is illegal and you have already downloaded it, delete it and don't send it to anyone else. This is probably best handled with a flagging system. Such a system would not be perfect, but could be improved with time.

I'm really glad they cancelled the project if that is what you were hired for.

The idea sketched out here is not equivalent to the project I was hired for. That project was never sketched out in detail and probably would not have involved bitcoin.

1) I'd say about 10% of the reddit user base even knows what bitcoin is, and far less have any. I don't see people willing to acquire bitcoin just to participate.

Today, most reddit users would not participate in this system. But we don't need 100 million users on Day 1.

2) At some point you have to host the content on a computer somewhere. Time on computers costs money. In the case of reddit, this is 1000s of dollars a day (and would be even more in a decentralized system due to the overhead of coordination). Right now the bitcoin economy is not robust enough to extract 1000s of dollars a day, and there isn't any provider that will accept bitcoin in exchange for compute at that level, or even close to it.

Yep. Probably the best way to do this is to found a company that hosts servers that host a lot of the content. Anybody could do this, of course, and the company's servers are not privileged in any way. However, by being the first and best service provider on a new decentralized platform, they would profit (I call this business plan the "Satoshi model"). Note how in the article I explain that the users actually pay to download content - a possibility that was not available when reddit was founded.

3) Fewer and fewer people have the ability to host content anymore, be it at home or in a datacenter. So you'd be relying on just a few people who would be willing to host content. This basically leaves you very open to an "attack" on the network by a bad actor, who could take it over with reltive ease if they were just one of a few that were hosting content.

Think of the hosters as being more like bitcoin miners or bitcoin full nodes. Anyone can do it, technically, but almost no one bothers to. The people that do make a business out of it.

4) Child porn. It would be way too easy for someone to put that on the network and then everyone would be at risk, further reducing the number of people willing to host (see the list of Tor exit nodes that aren't government spy nodes as an example of how few people would be willing to participate).

Don't host content you don't agree with. There could even be a flagging system for stuff like this so that you never download it in the first place where possible.

5) Related to number 4, the laws in different countries are different. If I host in the USA and you host in say Sweden, content that is legal for you may not be legal for me, again opening me up to liability unless I closely police the content, and unlike reddit Inc, I don't have the lawyers and common carrier protections.

Yes. As I said, you do not have to host content you don't like (but you also can't prevent other people from hosting/sending whatever they want to other people).

Like I said, I'd love to be proven wrong, but given my experience actually running reddit, I just don't think the bitcoin ecosystem is big enough to support it today or even in the medium future.

The bitcoin ecosystem is not mature enough to be as big as reddit today, but it is big enough to be as big as reddit on reddit's Day 1, or maybe reddit's Day 365 or so. This system and bitcoin could grow to ultimately be as large as reddit is today or larger, in 10 or so years (in a hypothetical best-case scenario).

I think the monetary system not only wouldn't "deter" adoption of the application, but would strongly incentivize its adoption. People will love being able to be paid for their work, rather than letting other people who they don't know get paid for it.

What about all of the thieves that have already locked up a significant amount of bitcoin?

That is a risk, but it is hard to do and wouldn't work most of the time.

Maybe that would give rise to DaaS (downvoting as a service)

There is no downvoting in this system, only upvoting. (How would you take bitcoin from someone?)

How/where would content be stored?

Modern web browsers have a real database called IndexedDB. The users store the content. Most users, of course, would not store most content. Users that wanted to could run the app full-time on their local machine, where the database would be leveldb instead of IndexedDB. They would store much more data. Not all data would necessarily be saved forever.

Also, how much would you expect each message to cost?

Payment channels reduce the cost of transactions to next to zero. An "upvote" does not actually go on the blockchain - only when channels are opened or closed to transactions go on the blockchain, incurring a transaction fee.