Show HN: Bitcoin voting on CoinSmack news site.

#1

Post by RobertKohr » Tue, Jan 24, 2012, 11:11 PM UTC

Show HN: Bitcoin voting on CoinSmack news site.
coinsmack.com

Re: Show HN: Bitcoin voting on CoinSmack news site.

#2

Post by RobertKohr » Tue, Jan 24, 2012, 11:14 PM UTC

I created a site where you can post links, videos, images, and blobs of text (html allowed).

It works much like most social news sites where visitors can vote up stories they like to the home page in various different categories. The difference is that the voting is in bitcoins in increments of 0.001 units. 80% of the bitcoins received go to the poster of the article.

Posting and voting up articles is an anonymous process, and no login is needed (also IP addresses & sessions are not recorded). For those that are into Tor, onion links are welcome and are marked with an onion icon. Hopefully this will help with the discovery of content on the onion network.

Re: Show HN: Bitcoin voting on CoinSmack news site.

#3

Post by feral » Tue, Jan 24, 2012, 11:50 PM UTC

RobertKohr wrote: post #2

I created a site where you can post links, videos, images, and blobs of text (html allowed). It works much like most social news sites where visitors can vote up stories they like to the home page in various different categories. The difference is that the voting is in bitcoins in increments of 0.001 units. 80% of the bitcoins received go to the poster of the article. Posting and voting up articles is an anonymous pr…

Interesting.

Hard to think what it would be like if it got traction, though; you don't have a reliable way of telling if a single user has voted multiple times - so anyone with enough bitcoins could buy the front page, right?

To keep advertisements/spam away, users would have to be willing to outspend spammers - is that really going to work? Surely, at that point, its just an advertising space, like a billboard, rather than a news site?

Another point is that, as posters get 80% of the bitcoins spent on their post, the poster (lets say they are a spammer) has more than a 5 to 1 natural advantage over legit users - because they get 80% of what they spend upvoting themselves.

Its interesting, but have you thought about these issues?

Re: Show HN: Bitcoin voting on CoinSmack news site.

#4

Post by franciscoapinto » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 12:12 AM UTC

I see this more as a feature on an already established link sharing site such as hacker news or reddit than as a standalone website. Good concept, though. Please prove me wrong.

EDIT: Also, I dislike the design. It's not very pretty. I'm not much of a designer myself, else I'd try to help you with it.