Social Website Based on Bitcoin Prepares to Soft-Launch With Free Off-Chain Transactions

A new social media website, called Yours, has quietly launched on Bitcoin’s testnet. For Bitcoiners, that might mean within the next few months off-chain, peer-to-peer bitcoin micropayments on a social network. Yours claims to offer an “array of payment models”, which allow content creators to make money.

Also Read: Is Bitcoin the Currency of Artificial Intelligence?

A Social Media Website with Micro-Payments Technology

“Our centerpiece is the purchase model, which is very simple,” explains Mr. Charles, who once worked as Reddit’s cryptocurrency engineer. “Everybody who posts content to Yours – including articles, video, images, audio – can pick a place in their content to put a pay wall.”

Users set the price of their own content. “So, if you write a compelling article with a cliffhanger, you can hide the conclusion behind, say, a ten cent pay wall.”

Yours, as well, will offer a micro-payments wallet. This has proven a controversial technical arena in the Bitcoin universe. In recent years, as increasing amounts of throughput have been introduced to Bitcoin, the cost of transactions have gone up. Tiny transactions are no longer cost-effective on Bitcoin. Yours seeks to repair this. 

“We have developed a smart contract network on Bitcoin similar to the Lightning Network,” Mr. Charles tells Bitcoin.com. “Except our protocol is not dependent on Segwit and can run on bitcoin today.”

This will be very useful for some Bitcoin users who find the current fee environment to be too high. “Yours allows users to possess their private keys and have full custodial control over their funds at all times, while being able to participate in off-chain zero fee transactions with other users,” Mr. Charles tells Bitcoin.com. 

Developing a micro-payments platform was not easy for Yours. “Our smart contract system is several times more complicated than a normal Bitcoin wallet,” according to Mr. Charles.

With the Yours testnet launched, anybody can pay for content, but not everyone can post.

“If you want to post, you will have to do a one-on-one demo with us so that we can get your real-time feedback about the experience,” Mr. Charles explains.

Soft Launch to Scale

There are numerous models allowing individuals to get paid on Yours, including paywalls on content. Further, a classic endorsement model will allow content creators to earn as users pay to upvote their content. Another model sees readers pay to see ads. Commenters can earn when their comments are upvoted. Individuals can also invest in a creator’s content, in order to earn returns on that content’s income over time. Overall, Mr. Charles is trying to take Yours slowly.

“We need a slow influx of users to help us identify the most important bugs before launching to a large audience,” he says.

Would you use Yours over Reddit? Let us know in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Yours

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