Satoshiwall development summary
Satoshiwall launched in late November 2019. Here are a couple of things I have changed since then. https://satoshiwall.cash
Accounts
Users can sign up on the site. It's fully optional. Accounts are not needed to post or unlock paywalls, but there are some advantages.
Referral program
Every Satoshiwall user has a personal referral link (click here to get yours). If you manage to on-board other content creators, you will receive half of the 10% fee I'm currently taking on each payment unlocking their content. Fully non-custodial thanks to BIP-70! https://satoshiwall.cash/referral-program/dashboard
Personalized feeds
When I launched Satoshiwall, it was basically a platform where anyone could post anything and have it exposed to everyone visiting the site. This turned out to be problematic. I do not have a problem with chicks selling their nudes and I have no interest in constantly moderating content, but at the same time the site should feel professional and be SFW. https://read.cash/@sjbuendia/satoshiwallcash-should-not-tolerate-this-dafee838
Instead of posting to one global feed, content creators will either need to build up a following on Satoshiwall, or shill the link to their paywalled content on other platforms. It will no longer be visible to everyone by default. It works like Twitter, users can follow and unfollow each other.
Free content
Content creators can attach "free content" to their paywall. This content is freely visible to everyone and can serve as a preview of sorts.
Fiat currency conversion
Paywall prices can be denominated not only in BCH, but also in USD, EUR and more! I keep adding currencies almost on a daily basis, and I try to add as many as possible. The entire interface can be switched to any of the supported currencies.
Currently supported fiat currencies: AUD, BRL, CAD, CHF, CNY, EUR, GBP, HUF, JPY, NZD, PLN, USD, RUB
Personal RSS feeds
Every user has his own RSS feed. This has many use-cases, like automatically having your paywalls posted on other platforms like Twitter.
Roadmap
There is still lots of work to do. I posted a general roadmap here. https://read.cash/@Satoshiwall/satoshiwallcash-roadmap-3ef58370
On PHP
You've probably heard it from your hipster friends. PHP is dead, or at least it's dying. At least that's what I've been hearing since I became a developer in 2013. Even though these statements can not be backed by data, they seem to have a significant impact on what kind of developers and technology the cryptocurrency space keeps attracting.
Let me go out on a limb here. Imagine Bob. Bob is a developer and he's interested in building a product or a useful tool around some cryptocurrency. The fact that Bob is interested in "crypto" is a good indication that he likes **new** technology. His preference for new tech will very likely impact his technology stack. Bob knows about PHP, but everyone around him keeps saying that it's dead, and he prefers "new" tech anyways, so he goes with newer options like Node.js, Rust or Golang, maybe Python. You know, the hipster stack.
That's perfectly fine, nothing wrong with that. There are good use cases for each of those languages. In fact, it's probably easier to build your crypto project with anything but PHP. Due to lack of good libraries it can be frustrating to deal with Bitcoin on PHP at times. When I decided to implement BIP-70 at Satoshiwall, I couldn't find a single working BIP-70 library. I had to fork one and throw together pull requests from different developers to make it work. This is very time consuming and even depressing. https://satoshiwall.cash
80% of the web runs on PHP
https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programming_language/ms/y
Now let that sink in. I built a BIP-70 payment server in order to accept Bitcoin Cash payments on my site, and there was **no working library** for the **most popular server-side programming language** in the world. I can only imagine how many developers gave up when they realized they need to build all that stuff from scratch, or that they would need to fix some old library nobody bothered to maintain.
We need to make things easier for PHP developers
We can't ignore the market leader in server-side programming languages. If BCH is supposed to be global peer-to-peer electronic cash, then web developers need to have an easier time implementing it into their **existing infrastructure**. This means we need to attract more PHP developers into the space, so they can build great tools that can be used by lots of other developers of said established programming language.
I'm telling you with great confidence that PHP isn't going **anywhere**. If the Bitcoin Cash community could somehow find a way to lower the barriers for PHP developers, I think that would be a great advantage over competing projects.
First days of Satoshiwall
Four days ago I finally released Satoshiwall.cash, a fully non-custodial bitcoin paywall. Although I'm currently on an island with painfully slow internet, I want to share a couple of insights I compiled on what feels like a 1997 ISDN connection. https://satoshiwall.cash
The numbers
As of November 25 02:43 UTC Satoshiwall handled 66 payments totalling 0.06709643 BCH or $13.41 (~200USD/BCH). That's $1.34 in fee revenue for Satoshiwall. https://twitter.com/satoshiwall/status/1198794288777158656
Not impressive, but it's actually better than I expected. This is a very early version and it's running on what is basically a minority fork of Bitcoin. Such a business can only be profitable on scale, but with Bitcoin Cash there is huge scaling potential.
Most traction will probably come with third party integrations (think of WordPress plug-ins etc) and maybe even support for SLP tokens (lots of stuff happening in the space). Imagine users paying for content without knowing they're dealing with Satoshiwall or even BCH at all. This is what ultimately needs to happen.
The traffic
Similar things can be said about the overall traffic. Roughly 100 users per day. The Novermber 22 spike came with some coverage in various news sites like news.bitcoin.com. https://news.bitcoin.com/developer-launches-bch-powered-paywall-service/
The content
So far it's mostly shitposts and I feel like I built an elaborate trollbox. But that's nothing I'm concerned about. The point of Satoshiwall is not to find content (although Cain made some interesting suggestions that could be considered), but to get access to the content of content creators they already trust. I advise everyone not to spend significant amounts on paywalls unless they know who is behind them. https://read.cash/@Cain/saturday-november-23-2019-145c9de7
Satoshiwall.cash roadmap
This is the roadmap of Satoshiwall.cash, the first non-custodial bitcoin paywall. This list will be updated regularly. Items are listed in random order. https://satoshiwall.cash
~~Show paywall prices in U.S. dollars too~~
Mobile optimizations
Auto post paywalls to t.me/satoshiwall (reverted) https://t.me/satoshiwall
Replace WYSIWYG with Quill editor
Ability to up- and downvote paywall contents
(Optional) user accounts
Option to denominate price in U.S. dollars
Public (free) content
Feed based on follows
Option to deactivate paywalls after n amounts of payments
Editable posts
Cash account support
Option to use xpub keys for creating paywalls (instead of p2pkh)
SLP support
Option to deactivate paywalls at a certain time
Add use case examples to landing page
Implement option for encrypting content before submitting form, client side decryption
Email notifications
@Satoshiwall