Why We’re Sticking With Bitcoin

Since we announced Yours, a community to help content creators get paid with bitcoin micropayments, one of the top questions we’ve been asked is “why bitcoin?” Some well-meaning people advocated that we make our own blockchain, since then we wouldn’t be stuck with bitcoin’s legacy choices, would have full control over our blockchain’s technical properties to suit our community’s needs, and could profit from speculation. While these are valid arguments, we believe they understate the difficulty of building a new blockchain from scratch and scaling it to reach a mainstream audience.

By leveraging bitcoin, we can take advantage of the largest blockchain technical ecosystem including open source software, documentation, standards, and APIs, as well as the largest blockchain social ecosystem including companies and experts. A new blockchain either has no ecosystem whatsoever, or, if we copy bitcoin, has an ecosystem only insofar as it overlaps with bitcoin. Building on bitcoin, though not easy, is easier than doing it alone on a new blockchain.

That’s the theory. A new project, Steem, has taken the very approach we determined wouldn’t work. They have built their own blockchain and customized it to suit the needs of their community. They’ve grown significantly and now have one of the most valued cryptocurrencies measured by market capitalization. And as best we can tell, it’s actually working — content creators are being paid.

Although we are delighted to see blockchain social media a reality, we worry that Steem can’t last. The burden of building not just a community and a technical platform, but also a novel cryptosystem and supporting economy, is extremely high. Security and scaling problems with their blockchain have a smaller team of experts incentivized to solve them, so solutions will come slower. Companies and services such as wallets and exchanges will be fewer in number and less featureful. When they encounter regulatory issues, they will have fewer allies.

At Yours, we are fully focused on solving the hard technical problems with bitcoin to enable the entire planet to earn money for internet content. Our gamble, backed by the huge number of open-source contributors and companies that service bitcoin, is that we don’t have to do everything ourselves for this to work — we have the network effect of the largest blockchain community to reinforce our efforts. For now this is just a theory, but we are hard at work trying to make it a reality. Join us if you would like to help.

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A few months ago I wrote an article called “Why I’m Sticking With Bitcoin,” which was about why Yours was not using ethereum. At that time, ethereum was in a massive rally. Since then, the DAO was hacked and the enthusiasm around ethereum has dampened. The timeliness of my article was an accident, but it reassures our stance. Like any good scientific theory, the bitcoin theory has not yet been nor can ever be proven, but so far has withstood every attack.