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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>when a user upvotes content, that sends a small amount of bitcoin to the author of that content

Doesn't this lead to a problem where money = votes? What would be other mechanisms to combat vote fraud?

>In order to download content, the user pays a very, very small amount of bitcoin to the peers on the network. This incentivizes people to keep the app open so as to keep servicing the other users

I don't think this is necessary. The bitcoin network shows that alturism alone is enough to sustain over 5000 nodes.

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"Upvoting" on such a system would be a little less like voting and a little more like tipping - think Changetip. There are some real problems here. What if a user pays theirself, thus voting their own content up? One way to solve this is for funds to be locked in some sense before they can be used. A user would have to lock up a significant amount of funds for a while before being able to vote, so it would be really annoying and expensive to commit fraud. There are also bitcoin transaction fees for putting bitcoin into and out of the system, so there is always that disencentive to fund a bunch of separate accounts for the purpose of committing fraud.

What about all of the thieves that have already locked up a significant amount of bitcoin? Wouldnt they be able to use that to easily overshadow a user? Maybe that would give rise to DaaS (downvoting as a service). Miners wouldnt care since they are getting their block rewards + mining fees -- which presumably the thief would gladly play.

> What about all of the thieves that have already locked up a significant amount of bitcoin?

That is a risk, but it is hard to do and wouldn't work most of the time.

> Maybe that would give rise to DaaS (downvoting as a service)

There is no downvoting in this system, only upvoting. (How would you take bitcoin from someone?)

I'm sure this is a question you all thought about, but.... If there are no downvotes, does community moderation work? Does this even resemble the Reddit we know of?

A lot of good posts and a lot of good comments are at a single-digit number of points (quite often 1), because clicking the upvote button is effort. I can only imagine how many posts will stay at one bitpoint if it takes actual money / work / computation to upvote. And those will be indistinguishable from genuine spam, trolling, off-topic rants, etc. (Given that the current Reddit uproar is about poor tooling for moderators, I don't think that shifting even more moderation burden onto the mods is fixing anything.)

There might be an exception in the voting patterns on the very large / default subs, but decentralizing the defaults alone is a very different goal. Most of the value of Reddit, especially if you care about anti-censorship, is in the long tail of subreddits.

> If there are no downvotes, does community moderation work? Does this even resemble the Reddit we know of?

This system would not be the same as the reddit of today. Whether moderation would still work - see all my other comments in this thread about flagging. Basically, flagging would serve as downvoting and would be partially effective. Would love to find a better way, but flagging may be good enough.

Honestly, the more and more I think about this, I just dont think its worth doing with bitcoin. There are too many poisoned coins tied to bad actors. If youve ever worked on a sizable community of forums (and Im pretty sure the "Bitcoin Engineer" for reddit doesnt count), you would know that trolls will troll. Simply because they can, and they will just keep coming back -- bitcoin makes that too easy. All they would need to do is create a new address, account and shift coins around (or tumble them to obfuscate the source).

Lets just think about how many coins have been "stolen". Those are all available to crap all over your p2p blockchain forum. The normal users could never compete. So now, not only do you have to maintain enough hashing power (as suggested above), now you need to maintain a sizable wallet of btc that can outspend a thief's reserve of coins. Just so your users can post on a decentralized forum network? Sounds like a losing battle. Good luck.

> Lets just think about how many coins have been "stolen". Those are all available to crap all over your p2p blockchain forum.

In a Bitcoin economy those are also available to spend on useful things, just like money. Put it this way: would rich trolls spend significant cash to troll you? I don't think so - they'd buy valuable things with their money for themselves instead.

"Troll" is an ambiguous wprd here. The question is whether anyone would spend significant amounts of money to control what gets upvoted and what doesn't. Given Reddit's recent $50M round, I'm hesitant to say the answer is no.

> There is no downvoting in this system, only upvoting. (How would you take bitcoin from someone?) A downvote is a transaction that costs like anything else, but you increase the cost of the downvote. For example, 2 karma to post (given to the owner of the node or community), 1 karma to upvote (goes directly to the OP), 2 karma to downvote (which allows you to subtract 1 karma from the OP - and all 3 karma go to the owner of the node or community).

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