Bitcoin Global News (BGN)
November 27, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- The proof-of-work
consensus mechanism is one of the most import aspects of Bitcoin’s
design. This is the process that provides miners a drastically
higher incentive to participate accordingly instead of attempting
to use their computing power to hack or steal from others. The
concept from a system of preventing email spam created in 1997 by
Adam Black called HashCash. He is now the CEO of Blockstream, a
major developer of the Bitcoin network.
Time Is Money - Electricity
Costs Money
Spammers on the internet started
with emails, and this has now spread across every social media
platform. They are forced to employ moderators to physically remove
the accounts making such posts. HashCash circumvented this issue by
forcing emails to take a small amount of time to send. Even where
an email took a few seconds, this would deter a spammer from the
network, because elsewhere, they could send thousands in that same
time.
For Bitcoin, this concept was put
on computational power. The blocktime for Bitcoin is always 10
minutes, but the amount of power put in by miners to win the block
rises with the number of miners, the amount of computing power
used, and the type of mining equipment used. In this way, miners
are betting the cost of running their mining equipment on the
lottery of the block, where they are rewarded with Bitcoin and
transaction fees.
Y’alls On The Lightning
Network
There are a handful of blockchain
based social media platforms, but most of them are built with their
own native cryptocurrency, or on a major network such as Ethereum.
The problem with Bitcoin for this type of application is that it
must maintain that 10 minute blocktime to maintain security of the
network.
However, the lightning network is
now allowing for novel applications to be built within the Bitcoin
network with nearly instantaneous payments. It was first proposed
in 2015 as a method for users to make payments and to receive
payments on side channels. These transactions are grouped outside
of standard Bitcoin blocks, and later confirmed to the Bitcoin
ledger when there are enough transactions to fill a
block.
Y’alls is a blogging platform built
on the Lightning network, and is only about a year old. It was
built for simplicity, and user rewards, while prevent spam. Similar
to the concepts employed with the BAT Token on the Brave browser,
users can choose to pay a blog author for their content. When
reading content, users can pay the platform 1 cent and 10 cents to
react to a post with an emoji. Publishing a post costs 1 cent as
well.
“The micropayments help there,
because then you don’t have robots or spam.” - Founder, Alex
Bosworth
Hobby-Scaled, But Room To
Grow
Alex Bosworth created the blog as a
hobby, so he keep detail data on readers or payments, nor has he
marketed the site or solicited contributions. Yet, from April
through early November, participants have processed nearly 20,000
invoices with the Lightning Network. Readers have opened more than
118 Lightning nodes through this platform, paid for 675 emoji
reactions and 194 comments. Contributors posted 170 new articles
and claimed rewards at least 432 times
Some node operators earned roughly
$5 a month. Although this seems tiny, it highlights how the
potential for growth. Earlier this year, Steem reached 1 million
users, and processes over 1 million transactions per day. Scaling
is perfectly possible with the Bitcoin network. This system scaled
to the use of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Linked in could
easily provide a sustainable income.
But more development is needed. Few
people know how to operate a Lightning-friendly crypto wallet or
node. General crypto-literacy is in short supply among mainstream
audiences.
“If the infrastructure were there,
so that there were less mental costs on the user to make that
payment, I think it could take off.” - Alex Bosworth
By: BGN Editorial Staff