Posts

PublishOx should utilize HIVE. An elegant solution to a nasty problem.

avatar of @niallon11
25
@niallon11
·
0 views
·
5 min read

For those of you that don’t know about publishOx,

It is a blogging site with a different method of rewards to HIVE. On publishOx they reward in a linear fashion from a shared reward pool. That means that everybody has an equal vote and can vote a certain amount of times in the day.

*Base tip value: A user can make six tips per day at the moment. The first tip of the day is 3x value of the base tip, while the last two tips made in a given day are half the value of the base tip. Ref: Publish/Ox Official

You can only vote for each author after a certain amount of time has passed and a minimum amount of time between voting for the same author. The tips are powered by ad revenue and come from a shared pool every time.

There is good and bad to this system as it allows everybody the same opportunity to tip which is good for smaller users and lets them earn from posting indefinitely with their content which is an advantage over HIVE. (We can also tip indefinitely on HIVE but it comes from personal funds instead of the shared reward pool.)

With the voting time limits it doesn’t encourage much interaction with the posts as you can’t vote for everything that you would like. It doesn’t encourage interaction with the posts as you cannot reward comments. It can be very quiet posting to there.

The main benefit to the publishOx model in my opinion is that they are funding the content from external sources which is something that I have been talking about for a long time and something that I want to see our front ends stat doing to push the price of hive.

Example A & B

PublishOx are already doing this with their site and it has huge potential in my opinion. It is one of their main selling points.

They do however have a huge problem. One that seems to have been dogging them from the very beginning of the project. They can’t seem to find the right token to base this model on.

From the day that I joined they have started and discarded payments in:

  • BountyOx (BNTY) - Discarded
  • HYDRO - Discarded
  • DAI token - Discarded
  • BAT – Active
  • Loopring (LRC) – Active
  • Ethereum – the latest addition.

The first few tokens do very little in the real world and were quickly discarded. Loopring has uses but doesn’t interest me to hold and while I did love getting BAT tips they have become very rare and while I do get some Ethereum at these amounts it’s not worth the fees to transfer it any where.

It’s great to be tipped in it but terrible to spend it and that is when the platform realized that they had fucked up.

Less than one month after announcing that they were integrating tipping in Eth, https://www.publish0x.com/publish0x-official-blog/announcement-payouts-delayed-due-to-extremely-high-eth-gas-f-xjjljwl

They ran into the fatal flaw that has stalled thousands of projects on the Ethereum blockchain. Crazy gas prices.

When we first started Publish0x, gas prices were 6 gwei. It cost us $10-20 to pay out 2000 people.Today gas prices hit an all time high of over 460 gwei, nearly 100x the cost. We're looking at $2,000+ cost for a payout at current gas prices. This is obviously not economically viable.

Just like many of the current dapps out there they have come to realise that while eth has many interesting use cases and has a big future, it will not be one in which micro transactions play and part. At least not for a long time. When a transfer can cost you more than the value of the transfer you know that you are fighting a losing battle and it’s time to change your strategy.

HIVE is a social blockchain that specializes in hosting apps and games. With it’s fast free transactions it already has the capabilities to host large amounts of traffic and has a lot of benefits for utilizing as the base token on a social media site like publishOx.

Three of the top ten dapps in the world are based on HIVE and have used these fast fee less transaction to their benefit as they build for the future.

Now I am not suggesting that publishOx base themselves on HIVE itself as they operate independently on a totally different principle to that of the current HIVE social media sites but I do think that they should think about the benefits there would be to utilizing the HIVE token for tipping and fostering some mutual growth between the two platforms.

If publishOx were to start using $HIVE for tipping:

  • HIVE has free transactions.
  • 3 Second block times.
  • 1,500,000+ current wallets.
  • Wallet names are easy to use usernames instead of strings of code.
  • HIVE has multiple blogging apps full of active writers which would bring exposure to PublishOx and new writers and readers for the site.
  • It already has a number of HIVE users on the site that would love to see more utilization of the token and be able to stake to our HIVE wallets. HIVE has real use case and can be spend in apps like @splinterlands, @cryptobrewmaster @risingstar.
  • There are lots of online shops accepting it for payment so that you can use it to buy real items. https://hivelist.store/ or integrate it with your own wordpress sites and enable more features.
  • We also have a plug-in for wordpress that allows people to publish automatically from their wordpress site to the HIVE blockchain and auto embeds comments and votes from HIVE back to your article. It would be great to see cross posting from publishOx to HIVE in the future as an immutable store of information and users to be able to earn from both platforms at the same time. Earn from ad revenue and from our reward pool with the same post while getting a lot more exposure and interaction from our existing user base is a win-win in my opinion. From our side we would be getting a lot of new and active users posting to HIVE ( in this future scenario) as well as buy pressure on the token and more users interacting with it on a daily basis by earning and spending HIVE in real life.

We would also gain the exposure to a whole new audience as they interact with HIVE for it’s wallet features and as they see it’s use case in powering the publishOx eco-system.

It makes a lot of sense to me and would be mutually beneficial to grow both of our projects together as we are looking at the same target demographics right now for users. Why not both win by combining forces to capture even more of them?

I would love to hear the thoughts of users and devs from both HIVE and PublishOx about mutual co-operation and growth and how we can create more use case for both platforms going forward. Why not all work together for a bigger win. We are not in competition with each other. The real competition is already established out there and we can do a lot more together.