Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

thousandetherhomepage.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 126 posts

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#11

Post by grandalf »

The idea of emergent PR via this sort of mechanism combined with a trustless and difficult-to-regulate infrastructure offers significant promise for breaking the glass ceiling that makes fame so difficult to achieve.

Ever wonder why news personalities and many celebs are so seemingly mediocre? It's this glass ceiling.

Platforms like Youtube solve part of the problem, but big fame takes big money, and so the funding mechanism has to be much more direct and consumer-driven than ad revenue sharing. ETH is perfect for it.

Many regulations on money transfers and political donation are designed so that they benefit those already in power. If you want to be a real leader it takes spending in excess of $1B, but once you do it you are feared and adored and have a place in the history books.

This is the game that our leaders are playing already, which is why Paul Ryan has a net worth of over $7M and the Clintons have wealth over $250M. They are simply the beneficiaries of massive marketing campaigns and care little for ideas or substance. Trump is the most blatant one to date.

It will be a good thing when this game is open to real competition so that non-elites can take a shot at getting the next $2B image makeover and a few years controlling the nuclear football.

It all starts with the simple freedom to fundraise and donate so that non-elites can form coalitions to elevate one of their own to larger-than-life status.

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#12

Post by shazow »

johncoogan wrote: post #10

Thanks for building this! I was wondering about this a few months ago, glad it’s finally here. This is such a good example. https://twitter.com/johncoogan/status/890780575480430593

Ah there you go! We had the same thought a few weeks ago.

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#14

Post by aaron-lebo »

grandalf wrote: post #11

The idea of emergent PR via this sort of mechanism combined with a trustless and difficult-to-regulate infrastructure offers significant promise for breaking the glass ceiling that makes fame so difficult to achieve. Ever wonder why news personalities and many celebs are so seemingly mediocre? It's this glass ceiling. Platforms like Youtube solve part of the problem, but big fame takes big money, and so the funding m…

Have we not seen the effects of this already? YouTube, Kickstarter, Twitter have already made it possible for nobodies to became massively famous. Most of them are mediocre.

It seems to me the surest way to guarantee mediocrity is to incentivise blatant money grabs. Here's a million a dollars for your billboard of ads? That's not going to build the future we are hoping for, it's gonna make someone else in 10 years make another copy.

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#15

Post by jasode »

I'm sure the authors don't have malicious intent but this project reminded me of emergent activity getting closer to the "un-erasable bad byes" scenario I commented on recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14434786

Anyways, it looks like a fun project and it will be interesting to see how it finally turns out.

Staying on the same theme, I have no doubt that somebody will also clone the recent Reddit "place" experiment in Ethereum. (https://www.reddit.com/r/place/)

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#16

Post by shazow »

jasode wrote: post #15

I'm sure the authors don't have malicious intent but this project reminded me of emergent activity getting closer to the "un-erasable bad byes" scenario I commented on recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14434786 Anyways, it looks like a fun project and it will be interesting to see how it finally turns out. Staying on the same theme, I have no doubt that somebody will also clone the recent Reddit "place"…

Right, we were worried about this also. The best solution we could think of is include an NSFW flag on ads that an admin (myself and Max) can force, which prevents the ad from being rendered by default.

The "bad bytes" are still out there, but at least we don't have to subject the consumers of our frontend to it unless they opt in.

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#17

Post by ojr »

jashmenn wrote: post #6

I love this idea! I actually just finished creating a video course that teaches you how to build a similar thing: https://www.newline.co/courses/million-ether-homepage/ In our version you're able to bid for each pixel -- if the previous owner is outbid, the funds are returned. Sending funds in Solidity from a contract is really tricky to handle because there are so many ways it can go wrong. For example, when you sen…

Don't send when someone is outbidded add a pendingReturns mapping of addresses and when someone is outbidded keep a track of returns and add another function for withdrawal

https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/solidity-by-examp...

let users pull vs push

I am also working on a Ethereum contract, Solidity language has great risks but also is great fun

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#18

Post by jasode »

shazow wrote: post #16
jasode wrote: post #15

I'm sure the authors don't have malicious intent but this project reminded me of emergent activity getting closer to the "un-erasable bad byes" scenario I commented on recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14434786 Anyways, it looks like a fun project and it will be interesting to see how it finally turns out. Staying on the same theme, I have no doubt that somebody will also clone the recent Reddit "place"…

Right, we were worried about this also. The best solution we could think of is include an NSFW flag on ads that an admin (myself and Max) can force, which prevents the ad from being rendered by default. The "bad bytes" are still out there, but at least we don't have to subject the consumers of our frontend to it unless they opt in.

>, but at least we don't have to subject the consumers of our frontend to it unless they opt in.

Right... but if your project gains huge awareness (or "notoriety" depending on perspective), someone else can replicate your work and show the bad bytes. (Because the urls are still there in the blockchain.) Unless I'm not understanding the architecture, the project would have escaped your ability to control it.

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#20

Post by thisisit »

shazow wrote: post #16
jasode wrote: post #15

I'm sure the authors don't have malicious intent but this project reminded me of emergent activity getting closer to the "un-erasable bad byes" scenario I commented on recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14434786 Anyways, it looks like a fun project and it will be interesting to see how it finally turns out. Staying on the same theme, I have no doubt that somebody will also clone the recent Reddit "place"…

Right, we were worried about this also. The best solution we could think of is include an NSFW flag on ads that an admin (myself and Max) can force, which prevents the ad from being rendered by default. The "bad bytes" are still out there, but at least we don't have to subject the consumers of our frontend to it unless they opt in.

I am wondering what capabilities do you guys have as admins other than the NSFW flag? And how does the NSFW flag affect the rendering when using Mist or Parity?
Post reply on HN