Saturday, November 23, 2019
Something interesting is happening in the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem. The recent announcement of satoshiwall.cash has opened my eyes to our now having several sites built on top of Bitcoin Cash, all of which are vying for the attention of both content creators and content consumers. It is evidence that entrepreneurs and builders see the potential of such a platform, and I am curious to find out who ultimately wins. Will there only be one site left standing in the end? Or will all three find their own niche?
The longest tenured of these companies is of course honest.cash. If you're not aware, they are a site much like read.cash, but they launched a year ago in direct response to yours.org switching to BSV. After seeing some initial success, they ran into some growing pains and lost their momentum. As a result, we got read.cash in October of this year.
Read.cash is still new, but they already have a wide array of features with many more listed to come on their roadmap. The site works well, but it is still looking for users. I want to add that I'm also happy the honest.cash team have taken notice and aren't backing down. I don't know who is going to win, but competition can only be good for us users.
And finally, today I saw the launch of the aforementioned satoshiwall.cash. It's brand new, so the creator is still working things out, but I think satoshiwall.cash could be a major contender. When I first read about it on twitter, I didn't see its full potential. We've had paywalls before, I thought. But after checking out the site, I think the idea is fascinating. For now the site allows anyone to anonymously post content and earn money for it by putting it behind a paywall. But in the future, I can imagine satoshiwall.cash becoming its own social network. One where you can create accounts and interact with one another, but all posts are behind a paywall (even if it's only a few satoshis). The idea is in doing so, you create a new market for content. In the old model, everything was free, but in a model where everything has a cost, where you are forced to join the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem in order to participate, I think it creates a new environment that wasn't possible before. I of course have no idea if it will catch on, but I like to imagine a world where the best minds are valued and rewarded.
The bottom line for me is that I think the best minds are already working on Bitcoin Cash, and the future of BCH is looking bright.
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The honest.cash / read.cash competition seems to really have brought an improved product to us on both ends.
I'm really looking forward to seeing where both sites take their users. I wonder whether IPFS as a storage backend is feasible for such sites. Are there any (not necessarily on BCH but maybe other cryptos) which use IPFS?