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Show HN: Bitcoin voting on CoinSmack news site.

coinsmack.com

34 pointsRobertKohr25 comments

I created a site where you can post links, videos, images, and blobs of text (html allowed).

It works much like most social news sites where visitors can vote up stories they like to the home page in various different categories. The difference is that the voting is in bitcoins in increments of 0.001 units. 80% of the bitcoins received go to the poster of the article.

Posting and voting up articles is an anonymous process, and no login is needed (also IP addresses & sessions are not recorded). For those that are into Tor, onion links are welcome and are marked with an onion icon. Hopefully this will help with the discovery of content on the onion network.

Interesting.

Hard to think what it would be like if it got traction, though; you don't have a reliable way of telling if a single user has voted multiple times - so anyone with enough bitcoins could buy the front page, right?

To keep advertisements/spam away, users would have to be willing to outspend spammers - is that really going to work? Surely, at that point, its just an advertising space, like a billboard, rather than a news site?

Another point is that, as posters get 80% of the bitcoins spent on their post, the poster (lets say they are a spammer) has more than a 5 to 1 natural advantage over legit users - because they get 80% of what they spend upvoting themselves.

Its interesting, but have you thought about these issues?

There is a decay effect on the home page (the "hot" section) where posts will fall off as they get older.

The current calculation is bitcoins/sqrt(time)

The spammer is still just a single person, and if no one is sending coins to lets say his "viagra" post, then even if he has an advantage, it only takes a few people to like something else to outgun him. How many people vote up something on the home page of reddit. If they all put in for that, it would be very uneconomical to compete with.

Keep in mind, I don't really have a huge amount of faith that the system will work out. It is an experiment in micro-transactions and psychology.

Time will be the best judge.

Have you considered letting users also spend bitcoins to downvote posts, but at a high ratio (e.g. remove 10 by spending 1)? That could clear up the advertising.

What to do with the leftover bitcoins? Maybe hold on to them.

I had code in there to do just that (at a 2x ratio) but commented it out before launch.

I am going optimism that it will not just turn into an ad site. If I end up wrong, then I will do something like this.

So far it seems to be a site where people that love dinosaurs come. Go figure.

You would have to tie the spending to an existing account with a reputation system. The effect of your vote could be the product of your spend and reputation. Also an upper limit the power from donation. I voting with currency alone seems doomed

I see this more as a feature on an already established link sharing site such as hacker news or reddit than as a standalone website. Good concept, though. Please prove me wrong.

EDIT: Also, I dislike the design. It's not very pretty. I'm not much of a designer myself, else I'd try to help you with it.

I am far from a designer myself, and no designer was involved in creating this (it was really just a weekend project).

I don't see how it is just a feature. It is fundamentally different regarding what makes up a vote, and how things get popular.

Try Twitter Bootstrap, it's perfect for circumstances like this.

http://www.markdotto.com/2012/01/24/bootstrap-2-ready-for-te...

Here's another bitcoin site made with bootstrap, fwiw:

http://bitcoinica.com/

Interesting concept.

Could you somehow allow for sharing revenue with content creators (where possible)? That way, people might be more incentivized to vote, since it would also be a donation to the creator.

Maybe you allow the submitter to specify the artist's email address, to which coins are sent. It would be an honor system, for sure, but it seems better than nothing.

Edit: in case it's unclear, I know that bitcoins can't be sent to an email address directly, but a link to a wallet can.

A way that wouldn't rely on the honor system is by having the content creator prove he controls that URL.

Let's say I post a link to Coding Horror. The system accumulates bitcoins as people upvote it, and then Jeff Atwood wants to claim them. He would simply register and a small piece of HTML with an unique value would be generated, which he would copy to that blog post.

The system can now verify the post is his and charge his address.

It's somewhat complicated (although not difficult to actually do), but on the other hand, we're talking about Bitcoin users ;)

The problem is that the content creator might not control the URL; their video might be posted by someone else to YouTube, or their image to Imgur etc.

I was thinking that if the submitter knows who the creator is, they can include that person's email address (which is usually not too hard to find).

Interesting, but I think you need to allow tags or at least "categories" - otherwise it will have too much noise for just about everyone. Obviously a redesign would help but this can be done further down the road.

I'd definitely participate if I could see some traction or be allowed to create a "community" on something concrete I'm interested about. I think tags+categories are the way to go.

Something awful user did a hack on the site where they injected a close tag into the category selector, preventing other users from posting for a while.

It isn't a meaningful site until something awful hacks it.

Either way, it is fixed now and you can continue to post.

For those that don't have any bitcoins, you can get some for free: http://coinsmack.com/posts/Help/Help,-I-want-to-use-CoinSmac...!

Why should I give people my bitcoins?

Why don't I just make a submission where the first people to upvote my story gets more of the profits while I collect a 10% service fee?

The typical vote is 0.001 bitcoins ~= 1/2 a penny.

This means that a vote up is very affordable, and it doesn't require attaining reputation on a site to push something you feel is worth while to the top of the stack.

You might want to 'thank' the submitter, or want others to see the article (yes, might be prone to abuse).

simplified remake of https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Witcoin

witcoin.com seems to be down, so probably right time. good luck! :)

What incentive do users have to deposit/upvote?

I think the incentive to vote is to say 'thanks' for a good submission (the votes are extremely cheap).

There will be definitely be many freeloaders though, if the site's successful.

Forget freeloaders, think traction. I can't imagine why I'd send bitcoins to this site versus just using Reddit.