There is No Dispute
Or how to build a community with satoshis.
We are in Eternal September. Even experienced members of the community can’t stop repeating the old and debunked mantras like “put everything on blockchain to make the world a better place”.
Or, imagine Twitter, but every Tweet is appended to a blockchain so that no tweet can ever be deleted.
I can’t argue in detail with the lengthy article “Crypto for People Who Don’t Follow Crypto”. For those who do not follow “Crypto”, I would propose to read 1 pager written by Preston Pysh.
However, I have something to add to the original post. It may be important. This is the first time I will try to report about an interesting “Crypto” experiment done for the Russian Bitcoin community using centralized escrow platform Etleneum.
This platform has an interesting “Features” contract among others. Its main purpose to crowdfund new features in few open projects. These projects are mainly software projects like Lightning Network mobile wallet Blixt or custodial wallet LNTXBOT for Telegram. The contract also contains the HypeCoinNews Telegram channel features state which enables crowdfunding of the content creation in the channel.
Readers of the channel “vote” with their satoshis for particular posts, that simple.
Early experiments with Lightning-enabled paywalls indicated a simple problem: it is hard to determine valuable content and optimize so-called “producer surplus” for profit maximization. Thus, some really demanding topics collected a few sats while simple hyping posts might collect much more sats with a paywall. Content creation became either a gamble or hard problem of economic calculation and users who didn’t know how to pay with LN sats (replace with any “crypto”) were very likely disappointed. Eventually, the public Telegram channel experienced “negative conversion”. It discovers the simple truth that paywalls in fact in most situations are evil.
“Crypto” may disrupt WaPo and NYT exactly because it doesn’t do paywalls.
On the contrary “Features” escrow contract led to the self-enforcing flywheel effect. Experienced readers of the HypeCoinNews channel who knew how to use Lightning Network now received not just the particular way for making donations but effectively were given an ability to select or even propose a particular topic. The contract enabled a governance mechanism for all participating projects. And this mechanism works on universally recognized digital currency. Just look at the contract call history at the bottom of the page, do Ctrl+F with “hypecoinnews” and count entries.
The implementation of Features on the centralized Etleneum platform is not ideal. However, it may be easily demonstrated how the approach could be replicated on decentralized fashion. Contrary to common ICO practice first declaring something disruptive and then (not) implementing it on the blockchain Etleneum as an escrow platform demonstrates and validates ideas which then may be repeated in some other decentralized form. Implementation first, this is how it may work with Etleneum. Who knows, maybe it will become decentralized some day.
