[jedberg]

> Yep. Probably the best way to do this is to found a company that hosts servers that host a lot of the content. Anybody could do this, of course, and the company's servers are not privileged in any way. However, by being the first and best service provider on a new decentralized platform, they would profit (I call this business plan the "Satoshi model"). Note how in the article I explain that the users actually pay to download content - a possibility that was not available when reddit was founded.

At some point to run a business you have to participate in the economy. The way you do that is be getting things you can use to trade for other things. Usually we use money as a way to simplify this.

How do you extract value from the bitcoin ecosystem, until there are enough people willing to exchange good for bitcoin, like food, clothing, and shelter?

> Think of the hosters as being more like bitcoin miners or bitcoin full nodes. Anyone can do it, technically, but almost no one bothers to. The people that do make a business out of it.

I think that's just proving my point. There would only be a few people participating as full nodes because it's complicated, putting the entire network at risk of a bad actor.

> Don't host content you don't agree with.

That's great but how do I find the content I don't agree with?

> There could even be a flagging system for stuff like this so that you never download it in the first place where possible.

Who would flag it? Can I trust them?

[yafujifide]

> At some point to run a business you have to participate in the economy. The way you do that is be getting things you can use to trade for other things. Usually we use money as a way to simplify this.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with bitcoin, but you can buy real stuff with it. It is quite well integrated into the normal economy at this point, considering how young it is. But of course it is not as popular as credit cards yet.

> How do you extract value from the bitcoin ecosystem, until there are enough people willing to exchange good for bitcoin, like food, clothing, and shelter?

You can buy food, shelter, and clothing with bitcoin. Spend some time around /r/bitcoin and you will see these opportunities. How many places could you use a credit card when they were only 6 years old?

> I think that's just proving my point. There would only be a few people participating as full nodes because it's complicated, putting the entire network at risk of a bad actor.

A p2p network where anyone can run a node seems strictly better than a central organization to me with respect to "bad actors". When reddit, Inc. makes a decision the users agree with right now, they can't overturn admin decisions. It would be far easier to do so with a decentralized reddit.

> That's great but how do I find the content I don't agree with?

I'm not really sure - most of the time you probably wouldn't know, so there would be times when you unintentionally hosted something you disagreed with. One way to solve that is to simply not host content at all, and only download.

> Who would flag it? Can I trust them?

This is the general problem of reputation, trust, authentication, and naming all in one. I think this project should aim to solve these problems sufficiently well to make things work effectively, and not solve them 100%. For instance, flagging could work by having a buddies list, and trusting their flags, and maybe their buddies' flags. That would be partially effective and better than nothing, but not perfect either. We would iterate and improve the flagging system with time.

[jedberg]

> I'm not sure how familiar you are with bitcoin, but you can buy real stuff with it. It is quite well integrated into the normal economy at this point, considering how young it is.

I'm quite familiar with it, but you really can't survive off bitcoin alone. There just aren't enough vendors taking it, but more importantly, this is because it is hard for vendors to price items since it so rapidly fluctuates. Bitcoin is also tax disadvantaged because it's classified by the IRS as an asset not as currency, so you get taxed every time you transact bit coin and it has "changed value" relative to the dollar. Can you image trying to do business with dollars if you had to pay tax every time it's value changed compared to the Euro?

> You can buy food, shelter, and clothing with bitcoin. Spend some time around /r/bitcoin and you will see these opportunities. How many places could you use a credit card when they were only 6 years old?

Food and clothes yes (although very limited choices). Shelter? I'm not familiar with anyone who takes bitcoin in exchange for a place to sleep.

You compare it to credit cards, but that isn't really an apt comparison because credit cards just represented dollars in another form.

> A p2p network where anyone can run a node seems strictly better than a central organization to me with respect to "bad actors". When reddit, Inc. makes a decision the users agree with right now, they can't overturn admin decisions. It would be far easier to do so with a decentralized reddit.

But then you get chaos and a fractured ecosystem. I would say that's worse.

> I'm not really sure - most of the time you probably wouldn't know, so there would be times when you unintentionally hosted something you disagreed with.

It's not the stuff I disagree with that's the problem, it's the stuff that's illegal -- ie. my government doesn't agree with.

> This is the general problem of reputation, trust, authentication, and naming all in one. I think this project should aim to solve these problems sufficiently well to make things work effectively,

I'm not even sure what to say here. I know this is HN, but this XKCD explains it perfectly: http://xkcd.com/1425/ (It's the one about making the computer recognize a bird)

[FatalLogic]

> I'm not familiar with anyone who takes bitcoin in exchange for a place to sleep.

From 3 minutes on Google:

http://www.expedia.com/

http://www.cheapair.com/hotels/

https://btctrip.com/

http://www.travelforcoins.com/

https://www.clickjett.com/

http://blog.9flats.com/9flats-accepts-payments-with-bitcoins

I'm not commenting on anything else you've said, but I really do have to question your claim that you're "quite familiar" with the bitcoin market

[jedberg]

As far as I know every one of those prices in USD and then uses an exchange to immediately convert bitcoin to USD. I don't count that as taking bitcoin.

[FatalLogic]

I think you're correct, but this is a disappointingly blatant straw man argument, because you were attempting to refute the claim "You can buy food, shelter, and clothing with bitcoin."

If we were arguing about the overall health of the bitcoin economy, then your point about conversion to USD would be relevant, but we're only discussing the utility of bitcoin for the consumer here. From the customer's point of view, it is irrelevant, what matters is that the company will accept their bitcoin.

[yazaddaruvala]

The rental markets seem to have solved a similar problem of "bad actors" through deposits. Similar techniques could be used here. e.g. Each MB of content uploaded requires an additional .1 bitcoin deposit.

[c_prompt]

> Who would flag it? Can I trust them?

>This is the general problem of reputation, trust, authentication, and naming all in one. I think this project should aim to solve these problems sufficiently well to make things work effectively, and not solve them 100%. For instance, flagging could work by having a buddies list, and trusting their flags, and maybe their buddies' flags. That would be partially effective and better than nothing, but not perfect either. We would iterate and improve the flagging system with time.

If karma equated to Bitcoin in some way (i.e., had tangible value), where users were giving each other karma via upvoting, you could reward users with a "bounty" for correctly flagging content as a certain type (e.g., spam, CP, not relevant to sub). Mods for that sub then make the decision if the flag was appropriate. If it is, those who flagged correctly get the earned upvotes (which equate to bitcoins) divided among them.

[TheDong]

So you're saying if I create two accounts, one that posts illegal content and one that very quickly flags it, I'll gain a bounty from users each time?

If you're going to say that the reward now must entirely come from the person who posted said content, well, that requires also solving the problem of each poster having to have a sort of "deposit" of money, which is marginally better.

[c_prompt]

> So you're saying if I create two accounts, one that posts illegal content and one that very quickly flags it, I'll gain a bounty from users each time?

No. The bounty comes solely from dividing up the upvotes among the users who flagged the post. Additionally, the cost to flag is 1 karma (so there's a disincentive to try to censor content), but you get that 1 karma back if a mod agrees with the flag. If there aren't any upvotes, there isn't any bounty to be divided and distributed.

Edit: Here's an example of the way it could work - https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/5qqqs/whats-a-modqueue...

[onkkil]

>I'm not really sure - most of the time you probably wouldn't know, so there would be times when you unintentionally hosted something you disagreed with. One way to solve that is to simply not host content at all, and only download.

Is it technically possible to divide a specific content to many providers? For example let this string "1234567890" be a content. Could an incentivized server A hosts first, third and tenth characters and server B and C host other characters. Could a client download the content properly in terms of speed. It seems like it is very similar or same with torrent and possible. Therefore, anyone could not be accused of hosting those random samples. Only integrating those samples -downloading- can be a kind of a guilt.