Evaluation of read.cash

15 131
Avatar for JonathanSilverblood
5 years ago (Last updated: 4 years ago)

First Impression

The website homepage is clean and non-cluttered which is generally positive as it means that the majority of the space is reserved for content. I feel though, that a short introduction to the platform itself would be useful on the main page.

The footer of the page could do with some more improvements as well, for example contact information, links to social media accounts and similar is commonly found (and therefor looked for) in the footer area.

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The editor

The text editor for making new items is simple and works, but with very little explanations and no guide or tutorial many users will find it difficult to use. It doesn't seem to be able to do embedding of other content, like images, audio or video.

On a sidenote, the editor offers headers by the name of H1, H2 and H3, which for the HTML-savvy users might feel really weird, given that they have known uses and H1 should already be set by the contents title.

The wallet

The wallet offers the basic functionality. There are options to deposit and withdraw, it uses the common 12-word backup mechanic but it doesn't disclose the derivation path which means using it will be hit-n-miss depending on what wallet you want to import it to. There's significant warnings about beta quality and while I don't see anything in the frontend that justifies that warning - it's still a very good thing to have for a new product until it has matured and seen proper peer use.

Verdict

After a quick test and looking over how it works, my conclusion is that while this is a work-in-progress and there's likely going to be issues during the beta period, the overall experience is good.

For my personal use, the lack of image and video embeds, as well as the somewhat quirky out-of-the-way editor, means I will not be using this service yet. What would be desirable for me personally is markdown support - there's so far no editor out there that I've used that beats the user experience of markdown for those who already use markdown extensively elsewhere, like on discord, telegram or github/gitlab.

3
$ 0.97
$ 0.50 from @DarthRoison
$ 0.20 from @Read.Cash
$ 0.11 from @bitcoin
+ 3
Avatar for JonathanSilverblood
5 years ago (Last updated: 4 years ago)

Comments

Very helpful review. I'd upvote but it seems deposits require one or more confirmations.

$ 0.00
5 years ago

Just in case somebody stumbles into this comment in the future. We've contacted emergent_reasons and it turns out that an extensions was blocking access to rest.bitcoin.com. The wallet of course accepts 0-conf (it's your wallet in the browser, we don't control it, so we see no reason not to trust your own 0-conf transactions).

EDIT: We've also implemented checks if all of the necessary APIs are available. The site will alert you if they aren't.

$ 0.00
5 years ago

Thanks for testing! Actually there are embeds already (try pasting a link to YouTube or Vimeo videos), also images - you can drag-n-drop the image or paste it from the clipboard. We will also add a button to add an image soon. I'll note all your comments too. Thanks!

$ 0.01
5 years ago

About derivation path: we'll add it to the on-boarding screen, but just in case someone stumbles into this post in future, it's: m/44'/0'/0'/0 (BIP39)

$ 0.10
5 years ago

I saw it in the on-boarding screen. That's nice. I might recommend that you provide a WIF private key instead though. When people try to setup the wallet in electron and then send or receive with it there, it will use it as an HD wallet instead of a single address as you guys seem to be using.

$ 0.05
5 years ago

About HD wallets: we currently use single address, yes, because it's a bit problematic to implement full HD functionality from the start. But we do plan to use HD wallets later.

$ 0.00
5 years ago

Good idea! Thanks!

$ 0.00
5 years ago

This to me indicates that you're using bitcore-wallet-client/services, and with emergents comment below using an auditable address. Having the exact same setup on the cashual wallet, I can say that the backend is rather flimsy and error-prone and it might be a good idea to transition away from it before you get too heavily dependent on it.

Another point I'd like to make is that if you're going to use single-key in an auditable fashion and thus have the implied loss of privacy, consider automatically generating a cashaccount for the address using the accountname, to get a better user experience when sending to/between users.

$ 0.00
5 years ago

No, actually we use bitcoin.com's library and rest.bitcoin.com APIs, which uses BITBOX backend I guess.

As for the single address - it's quite complicated to use HD wallet at this stage (basically a prototype), because we'd need to query rest.bitcoin.com's backend for hundreds of previous addresses to look if anyone sent an upvote to an old address, straining the free resources of bitcoin.com. We'd really like to avoid that until this project is a bit more mature and has it's own bitbox backend.

As for the derivation path - it's from bitcoin.com's wallet (though we accidentally added /0 to the end, which is a bit hard to fix now, since people have already written it, but we'll do it).

$ 0.00
5 years ago

Very helpful

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Follow-up!

The comments does not seem to enjoy the same luxury of an editor as the main content, but the financial interface has a very good user experience attached to it. It is easy to use, and I hope they keep the clear perspective of only having a single financial interaction - instead of some competitors who split tip/upvote into different functions.

Follow-up 2!

The comment functionality is poorly tuned, while writing my first comment, it for some reason complained about You doing that too fast, slow down a little.

$ 0.16
5 years ago

Ok, we've created this account to test the bug and it seems to be working find. First comment published without a problem.

$ 0.00
5 years ago

That's a weird bug. We'll look into it. Also we'll add some minor Markdown support to the comments.

$ 0.05
5 years ago

Trying out the comment system.

$ 0.00
5 years ago

Ok, we have seemingly found the problem. If you have created your comment within 30 seconds of publishing the article - that might have triggered the error. We have fixed it. Thanks for helping us!

$ 0.00
5 years ago