CCN spoke with Adrian Barwicki, a blockchain developer and IT consultant who moved to Germany from Poland for college years ago and never left. Barwicki and a few others work on Honest.cash part-time. Honest.cash is a project that allows people to earn Bitcoin Cash for contributing good content as well as curating it. The concept isn’t new – it’s based on the Yours.org platform, which moved to Bitcoin SV last November. Barwicki says he’d never used Yours.org personally but learned from Twitter that its presence on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain would be missed.
Initially, the idea of “curating” wasn’t evident to him, but Yours.org users made it plain it was a necessity.
“Curator” rewards are earned when someone else upvotes a post you have already upvoted. You get a small amount of the money they spend to upvote, while the creator still gets the majority. The rewards are further split the further down the line they go. If a piece of content becomes popular enough, you can earn your whole upvote cost back.
BITCOIN CASH HAS PLENTY OF BLOCK SPACE FOR HONEST.CASH
Barwicki says he doesn’t believe it was a purely technical move in the case of Yours.org – his website proves that Bitcoin Cash is still handy for the intent.
“Not sure they only had technical reasons to move to SV.”
Yours.org moving to Bitcoin SV left the Bitcoin Cash community without a monetized blogging platform, so Barwicki decided to take the opportunity to build one. He says he had long wanted to get involved in blockchain development but hadn’t seen a real chance until Yours.org created a vacuum.
Ultimately, Honest.cash isn’t trying to compete with Yours.org or even Cent.co – its goal is to disrupt companies like Medium, who earn a lot of money through premium accounts without returning much to the creators.
PERMISSIONLESSNESS IS MOST IMPORTANT
Discussing the principals of Bitcoin, Barwicki says that the most exciting and revolutionary aspect of cryptocurrencies is their permissionless nature. He said:
“Even though I believe it’s important to have a structure that supports privacy, blockchains are not about privacy. The permissionless aspect is more important.”
Barwicki says that, like most people, his first interest in cryptocurrency was in Bitcoin. He appreciates the idea of the Lightning Network, but he does not see any valid reason to limit Bitcoin block size to 1 megabyte at this point in history. Ultimately, he believes Bitcoin Cash will need scaling solutions as well but thinks the premature limiting of Bitcoin’s block size in favor of Lightning Network is a bad move.
“I love the idea of lightning. But I don’t think there’s any reason to stick to the size of 1MB.”
A GROWING PLATFORM
Barwicki’s platform enables users to make content “uncensorable” at the click of a button, embedding it in the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. It allows people who might not otherwise have an opportunity to earn cryptocurrency to participate and see how they fare. He estimates the current user base at over 2,000 users. He says he and the rest of the team will go full-time on Honest.cash if and when certain milestones are reached.
The company’s first revenue model was recently introduced: they take a small percentage of content hidden behind a paywall – which is the primary business model of Yours.org.
