As the highly anticipated debut of Yours approaches, the interests from the bitcoin community members and enthusiasts are rapidly increasing. Unlike most micropayments-based content sharing platforms however, Yours plans to develop and deploy its own unique Lightning-like system.
The Lightning network is an innovative scaling solution introduced by the Bitcoin Core development team to enable small and low-fee transactions instantaneously. Because the current bitcoin network is not designed to handle small payments, Lightning is presumed to open a previously unseen application of bitcoin.
One practical and viable application of Lightning is a micropayments-based peer-to-peer content sharing network, in which consumers incentivize content creators directly without the presence of mediators. To put it simply, it is like an ad-free decentralized Youtube, where users would pay their favorite Youtubers micropayments to access their content.
The emergence of micropayments-based content sharing platforms coincides with a variety of complaints with mainstream platforms like Youtube, in regards to privacy, advertisements, and censorship. For instance, the newly introduced Youtube Heroes program outraged the entire Youtube community, essentially by introducing a mass flagging tool for video censorship.
The Yours network is a solution to all of these issues consumers have with Youtube as mediators do not restrict consumers from accessing content of their preference. More importantly, the non-existence of advertisements appealed many content sharing platform users, who are upset with quality content overflowing with video advertisements.
To integrate bitcoin micropayments however, the Yours network have created their own unique system for small and cheap transactions. While the company admits that their design is inspired by Lightning, they plan to introduce their own independent system before the launch of Lightning.
@iamjosephyoung It’s own system based off lightning design. Mostly forward compatible, focusing on getting ours up and running 1st.
— Yours (@YoursNetwork) October 10, 2016
Considering that the Yours micropayments system will be forward compatible, it could ease the integration of micropayments for other micropayments-based content sharing platforms in the market like Popchest.