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 :)
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
Another idea is to have a "set your own price" w/wo a minimum price, like with Bandcamp, where the download is like a post-donation gift. Also, once paid, the purchaser may want to be able to leave an email address or message to get further discounts in the future from the artist as VIP fans.
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.
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".
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.
That is kind of confusing isn't it, because there's also a miner fee. Does your algorithm know how to subtract the miner fee to get the unique amount? Also, are your floating point operations (subtract, compare) done correctly?
Anyone who uses floating point numbers in a bitcoin project is doing it wrong. Bitcoins have a fixed (for now) level of precision. 1 satoshi is currently the smallest discrete amount of bitcoin that can exist.
The miner's fee is separate from the amount sent, this is easy to distinguish.
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 :)