More details are revealed of colourful racing identity Kim Dotcom’s terrible Bitcoin idea: Bitcache! Which even has a Wikipedia page! (With a totally non-promotional-looking edit history.)
Dotcom introduced the idea last year with this frankly disturbing tweet:
It wasn’t clear what the idea in fact was, but the crowdfunding pitch somehow netted £850,000 of actual money.
He released a video yesterday with a quick explanation and demo:
Bitcache & Megaupload 2:
A first look at encrypted anonymous content delivery with build-in Bitcoin payments. Private. Easy. Safe. Tidy. pic.twitter.com/QHjU5pisGe— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) April 3, 2017
It looks like it doesn’t just supply a payment mechanism for MegaUpload 2 — it’s a frontend that lets you monetise any Internet files or “streaming site” — “two cents, two dollars, twenty dollars.” The Bitcache link is then available on MegaUpload 2. So it’s really a shop front for anything, taking Bitcoins as payment.
There are a number of problems with this idea, most of them being Bitcoin, which has been addressed at length on Rocknerd previously: it’s awful garbage you should stay away from if you value your bank account. (And I’m currently writing a book on how relentlessly terrible absolutely everything to do with Bitcoin and blockchains is.) Bitcoin is presently useless for micropayments — the median transaction fee is on the order of 50 cents US — so most of the money will be processed off-chain, where you can’t see it. But you can trust Kim.
It’s not clear how a shop front like this benefits from Bitcoin, except of course the hype angle, which has admittedly done wondrously for it in the last couple of days. Dotcom is only slightly a convicted felon with an extensive history as a con man, so I’m fully confident it’ll all be fine, fine.
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