“Hers is like Medium with a paywall,” Charles describes his product. He has been on a mission to improve the quality of online content and believes that the best way to achieve this is to allow creators and curators to receive payments directly from customers without third-party subscriptions or advertisements.
The platform has long been hailed as a possible Bitcoin “killer app” and as a Bitcoin alternative to Steemit. However, Bitcoin’s scale bottleneck made it impractical and Charles announced Thursday that he had switched from using bitcoin to using litecoin within the entire economy of him.
Switching to Litecoin also allows yours to boot sooner, as Charles has repeatedly stated that he waited for Bitcoin’s scaling problems to disappear before his he could be a profitable business. Thursday announced:
We’ve released an invitation-only preview and are planning a full release on May 30th.
Solving Micropayment Problems
Charles has long faced the challenge of making micropayments viable. The traditional method of making a payment has never been viable for small transactions. “We can’t just use Stripe,” he explained, citing Stripe’s high fees of around 30 cents or more. “That means a one-cent payment to a creator would cost 31 cents and 97% of the money would go to Stripe,” he added.
That’s why he spent over six months developing a Bitcoin micropayment solution. “Our solution is like the Lightning network, but it doesn’t depend on Segwit,” he explained, adding that “the marginal cost of a transaction on our network is zero, allowing for genuine micropayments of a dime or less.”
Then, in May, he announced that his has become the first and only platform to date to “demonstrate a routed micropayment that works on Bitcoin.”
What has Changed?
Over the past year, Charles has witnessed the change in Bitcoin. He described:
The demand for bitcoin transactions has increased and the maximum block size has been arbitrarily kept limited to one megabyte. So the transactions have to compete to enter a block. This resulted in an increase in the cost of on-chain transaction fees from around five cents to around one dollar. That’s a 20-fold increase in just one year. He went on to point out what the cost of handling fees and delays on Bitcoin transactions would specifically affect his system. This made the entire platform unworkable, despite all the hard work being done in developing the micropayment solution for Bitcoin. Just having users add funds to their Tuya account, which creates a chain transaction anyway, is already too expensive. “Given the average transaction size in our system, this costs around $ 3,” she said. “This means a consumer can’t just put $ 1 into the system, because that wouldn’t even cover the cost of bitcoin transaction fees.”
Further, arguing that the economics of the situation with Bitcoin is simply unfeasible, Charles added that, as with Stripe and Paypal, Bitcoin’s fees will remain in the 30% range as long as the scale issues exist, assuming they stop trading. . He has declared:
This is inconvenient for a consumer product intended to reach a large audience with a low barrier to entry.