top | item 7986555

Show HN: Coinwall, a bitcoin paywall

49 points| marcell | 11 years ago |coinwall.co

29 comments

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[+] bobbygoodlatte|11 years ago|reply
Very cool. One idea you might play with is the idea of debt. In other words: allow me to view the content for free a couple times, while racking up an "IOU".

Perhaps after the debt accumulates I'm forced to pay my freeloader's bill to continue seeing content.

Second: Go to where the users are. You should have Coinbase support.

Looking forward to watching where you take this :)

[+] marcell|11 years ago|reply
Re IOU system: that is an interesting idea! It would solve one of the big problems with micropayments, which is the mental barrier. Thanks.

Re Coinbase support: point taken; they are indeed one of the most popular wallets.

[+] dijxtra|11 years ago|reply
Excellent concept... but I could not use it. It says "To view 46 words of content, send exactly 0.00015612 BTC ($0.10) to 12smAWhdY9aMFyEenX6NLVZDend5WJgfVc". I paid with this transaction: https://blockchain.info/tx/047a379b7530f98876818540356b66964... And nothing happened, not even after 2 confirmations.
[+] rarestblog|11 years ago|reply
Yes, excellent concept, but also did not work for me. Also attempt to refresh the page asks for another payment. In this moment of weakness you wish there was a "refund" button on BitCoin :)
[+] AgentME|11 years ago|reply
I payed it, it confirmed practically instantly, said "loading content...", and never got past that step. When I refreshed, a new paywall was in place asking for another payment.
[+] marcell|11 years ago|reply
Did you get a "payment detected" message on the client side?

Also, if you have a refund address, I can send the BTC back. It is a small amount, but still :)

[+] rolleiflex|11 years ago|reply
"Coinwall is a zero-friction paywall that uses bitcoin."

A little bit ironic. Isn't paywall itself friction?

[+] StavrosK|11 years ago|reply
Given that you need the paywall, there's no additional friction. By that logic, doing anything is friction, compared to not doing it. Why breathe?
[+] jasonzemos|11 years ago|reply
I'm assuming the technology behind this is either of two things:

* An implementation of probabilistic nanopayments (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Nanopayments)

* Massive amount of extremely small transactions.

I'd like to know if any consideration has been made for the amount of data hitting the blockchain when this scales. A flood of transactions will cause fees to rise higher than the principal payment.

[+] gbl08ma|11 years ago|reply
I built something like this into my URL shortener a long time ago ( http://tny.im/toll.php ). However, it is nowhere as easy to use, uses the Blockchain.info wallet APIs in a way they were never meant to be used, doesn't have automatic (nor automated) payouts and I'm not even sure that it still works. I never really advertised it seriously. Since nobody ever really used it, and because it's not the main purpose of the service (it has enough feature creep already...), I am considering discontinuating the feature.

If Coinwall becomes popular (and I hope it does) I'll be damned :)

[+] adrianwaj|11 years ago|reply
Cool. Good for Soundcloud or YT users that want to provide links to dl their content for a fee without requiring too much hoop-jumping. Even a way of locating some content just through the referral link would be nice... that way a user on their SC and YT pages can set a permalink, but provide the redirection addresses on coinwall. Or rather, coinwall could have a "Soundcloud/YT" referral url that the user fills in when setting up the download: it's preprogrammed to handle those referrals and even stats could be given on the download page and the site could offer top-10 lists of music and video.
[+] marcell|11 years ago|reply
Yea, I was thinking of adding file upload support for music/videos is a next feature. Having support for Soundcloud/Youtube/etc. URLs is a neat idea and would make for an easy UX.
[+] cr3ative|11 years ago|reply
Ah. It seems to link directly to the protocol address "bitcoin:" - and I don't have anything registered to pick up on that - making the button appear completely broken for me.
[+] glitch003|11 years ago|reply
You should get a bitcoin client :)
[+] jacques_chester|11 years ago|reply
Very clever. However I still think that any scheme that requires people to pay in advance is going to struggle. You're always going to be facing the "simulation heuristic".
[+] udfalkso|11 years ago|reply
Great concept. Experience still needs some work...

How does the verification work? Do I have to register to verify that I've paid?

[+] marcell|11 years ago|reply
No registration is required to pay or to make a paywall.

Verification is done by assigning a slightly different payment amount to each person. For example, if you are charging 0.00015 BTC, the amount 0.00015001 and 0.00015002 may be used to distinguish two payments. These amounts are cycled every ~15 mins.

Edit: Also, I may add support for BIP32 master public keys in the future. This would allow derivation of child public keys on behalf of the user, providing a unique payment address for each transaction. This is technically easy to do, the only problem is most people don't know how to access their master public key.

[+] bowmessage|11 years ago|reply
The blockchain will take care of that! Just have to provide a different BTC address for each user.
[+] slipstream-|11 years ago|reply
Any chance of dogecoin support? Given their community thrives on micropayments...