No offense as I'm sure you're a great guy, but I'm really glad they cancelled the project if that is what you were hired for. There's so many reasons this could never work (I would loved to be proven wrong though).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> Don't host content you don't agree with.
That's great but how do I find the content I 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.
> 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.
> 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.
I'm quite familiar with it, but you really can't survive off bitcoin alone. There just aren't enough vendors taking it, but more importantly, this is because it is hard for vendors to price items since it so rapidly fluctuates. Bitcoin is also tax disadvantaged because it's classified by the IRS as an asset not as currency, so you get taxed every time you transact bit coin and it has "changed value" relative to the dollar. Can you image trying to do business with dollars if you had to pay tax every time it's value changed compared to the Euro?
> 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?
Food and clothes yes (although very limited choices). Shelter? I'm not familiar with anyone who takes bitcoin in exchange for a place to sleep.
You compare it to credit cards, but that isn't really an apt comparison because credit cards just represented dollars in another form.
> 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.
But then you get chaos and a fractured ecosystem. I would say that's worse.
> 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.
It's not the stuff I disagree with that's the problem, it's the stuff that's illegal -- ie. my government doesn't agree with.
> 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,
I'm not even sure what to say here. I know this is HN, but this XKCD explains it perfectly: http://xkcd.com/1425/ (It's the one about making the computer recognize a bird)
As far as I know every one of those prices in USD and then uses an exchange to immediately convert bitcoin to USD. I don't count that as taking bitcoin.
I think you're correct, but this is a disappointingly blatant straw man argument, because you were attempting to refute the claim "You can buy food, shelter, and clothing with bitcoin."
If we were arguing about the overall health of the bitcoin economy, then your point about conversion to USD would be relevant, but we're only discussing the utility of bitcoin for the consumer here. From the customer's point of view, it is irrelevant, what matters is that the company will accept their bitcoin.
The rental markets seem to have solved a similar problem of "bad actors" through deposits. Similar techniques could be used here. e.g. Each MB of content uploaded requires an additional .1 bitcoin deposit.
>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.
If karma equated to Bitcoin in some way (i.e., had tangible value), where users were giving each other karma via upvoting, you could reward users with a "bounty" for correctly flagging content as a certain type (e.g., spam, CP, not relevant to sub). Mods for that sub then make the decision if the flag was appropriate. If it is, those who flagged correctly get the earned upvotes (which equate to bitcoins) divided among them.
So you're saying if I create two accounts, one that posts illegal content and one that very quickly flags it, I'll gain a bounty from users each time?
If you're going to say that the reward now must entirely come from the person who posted said content, well, that requires also solving the problem of each poster having to have a sort of "deposit" of money, which is marginally better.
> So you're saying if I create two accounts, one that posts illegal content and one that very quickly flags it, I'll gain a bounty from users each time?
No. The bounty comes solely from dividing up the upvotes among the users who flagged the post. Additionally, the cost to flag is 1 karma (so there's a disincentive to try to censor content), but you get that 1 karma back if a mod agrees with the flag. If there aren't any upvotes, there isn't any bounty to be divided and distributed.
>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.
So if there is a "first-and-best" service provider, how exactly does this change from what Reddit is doing today? I can't really wrap my head around how you have defined the problem, nor how this solves it. You still have Reddit at the center - and to most users thats all they will ever see.
This solution doesn't seem very different from writing an application that downloads all content from reddit and posts it to voat. If reddit decides to be a bad actor, it won't really matter because they still own most of the pie.
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? 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.
Sure the load could be distributed to a p2p network, but how are you really going to prevent malicious users/nodes? It seems like it would be a nightmare to develop a fair system. A fair system where a user's post is actually propagated (included in mining) to the network and not silenced by a large installation that doesnt want the content on the network. It would seem that if youre using some sort of bitcoin system (or some derivative), a node would just need to contribute enough hashing power to exclude specific content that they don't like (or have been paid to exclude) a significant amount of time to frustrate users. Your centralized resources would always have to be able to provide more hashing power to keep control of the network. Seems silly to chase after big mining installs. Maybe I dont understand your idea... "Fix reddit with bitcoin! [[insert story about being let go and why what you were working on was actually valuable]]" doesnt really explain anything. Maybe this could be a good idea, but it just sounds like vaporware at this point.
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.
Disclaimer: I own some bitcoin. So dont think Im just trashing on bitcoin.
> 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.
> 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.
But is that really true? The overwhelming number of users that would participate (at reddit's scale or a couple of magnitudes less) have 1) never heard of bitcoin, 2) dont own bitcoin, 3) think its scammy or for buying drugs. Almost all of the potential users would have to purchase bitcoin just to participate. The only people that would be annoyed by using an altcoin are the ones that currently own bitcoin and would not receive a benefit from an increase in value.
Lets be real. This type of application could definitely be developed with some sort of decentralized/p2p token system where tokens are earned, posts are paid for them and maybe the tokens gain some sort of value, but it doesnt require bitcoin. It could literally just be pebbles picked up off the ground if enough people believe that that is correct. Bitcoin isnt valuable enough and doesnt have enough utility for it to be an absolute requirement.
Are users going to pay for decentralized Reddit? I'm not sure they will care much about the possibility of the company's interests being against them, especially the majority of users who don't speak much of politics.