Saturday, November 23, 2019

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Written by
4 years ago

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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Avatar for Cain
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4 years ago
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Comments

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?

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4 years ago

If k.im is using IPFS to store their paywalled content, I don't see why non-paywall stuff like read.cash articles couldn't be stored there. Though, it would certainly make editing posts harder - either a new link would have to be generated with every edit, or the ID of the latest edit would need to be stored somewhere. It certainly is possible, though!
That, and IPFS only stores files for a period of time after download, unless they are pinned. So, unless there are tons of people with the IPFS client installed on their machines and activelly pinning stuff they like, IPFS is still pretty much centralised... :/

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4 years ago

Well, first of all it's usability. If we were to use IPFS - that would mean that it would take a few seconds (or maybe a minute?) until a post loads from IPFS. Second, search engine visibility. IPFS content should probably be loaded via JavaScript and though search engines kind of are good at indexing JS content, but they won't wait 10 seconds until content loads. They'll label you "slow" and you won't see yourself in the search results.

Third is "what's the point" point :) I mean we clearly state why we're not censorship resistant: https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/what-is-readcash-7b0bfcfc#are-posts-stored-on-chain-is-this-site-censorship-resistant Having something like IPFS would probably mean that we wouldn't be able to clean up the site.. and it'll turn into this fast enough: https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/so-youre-against-censorship-f2b4df3a

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4 years ago

If something is stored on IPFS, does that mean I can never delete it?

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4 years ago

The paywalls on read.cash were also requested since day 1 :) and it's planned. But before that we have a much more interesting feature coming out that's related to Bitcoin Cash: The People list

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4 years ago

Yeah I was glad to see it on your roadmap. Looking forward to watching this site grow. Obviously I'm a fan.

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4 years ago