Reddit has shut down its nascent cryptocurrency project

We will be issuing redditnotes.

Our research leads us to want to wait until the law and technology around cryptocurrency are further along before deciding exactly how. We want to make sure we can give the community the full value of the equity when they receive it in the future, and today we haven’t been able to find a way to do that within existing regulations.

Edit: here's the last official blog post on the subject. http://www.redditblog.com/2014/12/announcing-reddit-notes.ht... We were not contacted by this guardian reporter didn't contact us for comment. So it goes.

First of all, if it became commonplace that reddit accounts might contain some sum of crypto-money, the bustling onslaught of salivating hackers would become so tremendous that the site would likely be crippled under the weight of user grievances and brute-force traffic. I'm sure mandatory MFA would be put in place to increase security, but it wouldn't change the fact that reddit would become a major target for hackers, and many people would lose their money, despite MFA.

Next, I think the incentives for shit and spam posts would rocket off the chart as scammers, beggars and cam-models would likely flood the site with crap so that they can extract tips from anyone willing to toss penny shavings in their direction. Karma is already a sufficient reward mechanism, adding money into the fray is totally unnecessary and would almost certainly lower the quality of discussion.

Finally, this may be a stretch, but I fear that integrating crypto-money into the site would open the door for pay-to-subscribe/pay-to-view/pay-to-comment/pay-to-vote subreddit mechanisms. I understand that reddit is a business, but I think that this would be objectively bad, and even worse if subreddit mods were able to get a cut of it.

In the end, I don't think reddit needs crypto, it doesn't make the site better in any conceivable way.

For instance, /r/watches is an active area for discussion of watches. The people who post there often share their new Rolex or their treasured Patek Phillipe. /r/watches is just one of many, many such niches on the site which have a lot of potential value.

My thinking has been that reddit could focus on developing the value in its many product oriented subforums.

Also, interestingly enough, reddit has already sort of created its own new cybercurrency - dogecoin. Though it may not be doing well, I think most of the value in dogecoin was how easy it was to use on reddit.

reddit does need to find a way to monetize. I think it could do so quite successfully due to the nature of it having many high value niches.

I say all this as a big fan of the site and have even been considering making a subreddit finder (so that someone who is a fan of the TV show Suits, for instance, can know that there is /r/suits to discuss the show, which they would have simply no way of knowing if they just landed on reddit's homepage with pictures of Very Round Eggs, to use a current example).