reddit is a uniquely internet thing.Because identities are pseudonymous, people aren’t afraid to express themselves.Combined with a simple but effective reputation system, this leads to a faster-paced, higher-quality production of cultural content than anything else in the history of the world.Most of the content is positive, and some of it is disturbing.It’s the emotional core of humanity freed from the cumbersome constraints of physical reality.reddit is internetland.The only problem is that reddit’s servers are hosted by a central organization.Because humans have interests, and no two humans’ interests align perfectly, it is often the case that the interests of reddit, Inc.come into conflict with reddit, the users.Sometimes this means too much advertising, but more generally it’s that reddit, Inc.focuses a little more on converting content into money so they can pay their bills and give a return to their investors, and a little less on building better tools and giving a better experience for the users of reddit.

And the users don’t get paid for their labor.reddit, Inc.has always been cognizant of this asymmetry, and they have done a good job walking the fine line between overexploiting the users, which would drive them away, and undermonetizing the content, which would cripple the experiment.has tripped up from time to time, making things worse for both the company and the users.What we need is a fundamentally better way to do things that can eliminate the asymmetry, keep the lights on, and allow everyone to be rewarded in proportion to their contributions.I had an opportunity to talk to the then-CEO of reddit, Inc., Yishan, last summer, and told him I wanted to create a decentralized reddit.He was very excited about this idea— turns out they had a high-level plan of decentralizing reddit in the works, and they needed someone to execute this vision.Soon thereafter, I left my job at BitPay, the leading bitcoin payment processing company, to join reddit, Inc.My primary goal at reddit on Day 1 was to decentralize reddit.There is a problem with decentralization, which is how to incentivize the participants.

Since there is no company in the middle that can earn money from advertising to pay the server bills, the people themselves need to earn money to pay their own costs of hosting the system.Using a credit card doesn’t work, because there would need to be someone in the middle processing payments, breaking the decentralization, and introducing the same asymmetry we are trying to solve.To create a purely decentralized reddit, we need decentralized money.Such a thing was invented in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto: bitcoin.The way a decentralized reddit works is like this.Each user has an app, the reddit app, which connects to the reddit p2p network.For most users, the app is a normal web app.Each user funds their own app with a small amount of bitcoin.In order to download content, the user pays a very, very small amount of bitcoin to the peers on the network.This incentivizes people to keep the app open so as to keep servicing the other users.Furthermore, when a user upvotes content, that sends a small amount of bitcoin to the author of that content, thus incentivizing the production of good content.

If all the content is authenticated, we can be reasonably sure most payments are going to the right people.In this scenario, reddit, Inc.still exists, they just don’t have a monopoly on the hosting of reddit content.Instead, anyone can run the app to host the content, and reddit, Inc.online bitcoin faucet botis just the biggest service provider.litecoin pool clientAny user can run a business by running the app full-time.ethereum wealth dailyAny user, including reddit, Inc., can censor content they themselves deliver to other users, but cannot censor content other users send to other users.On Day 2 of my job at reddit, things changed.They announced they had raised $50 million in a new round, which I hadn’t been aware of until then.They also announced something even more interesting — that reddit would be giving away 10% of the new shares back to the reddit community in the form of a cryptocurrency.

This was a totally different way to solve the same problem.Rather than decentralizing the service, we could just make all reddit users owners of reddit, Inc.If reddit grows, the users get rewarded by having equity.Since I was the only cryptocurrency engineer at reddit, I naturally offered my time to help make that project happen, and spent less and less time working on decentralizing reddit.Quickly, I became full-time on the cryptoequity project, and stopped working on decentralizing reddit altogether.The rest is history.Yishan would resign a month or so later due to exhaustion, and new leadership took over the company who set out a new direction that didn’t involve any of the work I was doing.The cryptoequity project was shelved, and decentralizing reddit indefinitely delayed.I was laid off after being at the company for only four months.There is still hope.Whether at reddit, Inc., or somewhere else, the technology to create a decentralized reddit is almost entirely in place.Bitcoin provides the mechanism for p2p payments, and Web RTC, or something similar, provides p2p connections between the users.

To most users, it would feel just like reddit, except they have to maintain a small bitcoin balance to be able to perform actions on the site.Some users to who produce great content will be rewarded with a lot of karma, which in a decentralized reddit is real bitcoin with real value that can be spent on real goods and services.A real economy for internetland.I’ve collaborated with a lot of other people to produce some of the fundamental software necessary to make a decentralized reddit (see all my projects on GitHub — especially this one).It’s not done yet and there is no prototype, but I would love to find collaborators to build something concrete.If you’re interested, please reach out to me at my twitter handle at Google’s popular mail domain.I discovered bitcoin in early 2011.At first it was something that felt like play money and almost surreal.I didn’t fully understand all the details back then, but a decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency was just too crazy and I became intrigued.

Over the years I started diving deeper and deeper into bitcoin.Along the way, the true power of it really jumped out at me: I ended up doing some freelance bitcoin development just before I joined Buffer.It’s often a topic that my brother and I can talk about for ages.There’s tons of potential here, and VCs see it too.Bitcoin is often seen as a speculative investment, like a digital asset.However I’ve often been intrigued to explore using bitcoin more often.Although I do keep part of bitcoins as an investment, the times that I have used bitcoin to transact online, it’s been an absolute joy.I’ve made many purchases, such as booking hotels in New York (for traveling before the fourth Buffer retreat), buying coffee and even games online.The list of merchants who accept bitcoin just keep growing, including Microsoft, Dell and many more.The ecosystem has flourished since 2014, when I realized that I could definitely start spending bitcoin regularly for parts of my life.I didn’t want to lower my bitcoin assets too much, so I decided to explore the option of getting paid in bitcoin as a way for me use bitcoin as both an asset and a currency.

Before I started the process with Buffer in getting paid in bitcoin, I took stock and chatted with my girlfriend about what seemed feasible in terms of holding bitcoins as a currency.Bitcoin is infamous for its volatility, and at this point getting paid fully in bitcoin would not make sense for me.It’s just too risky.I decided as an experiment to start off with getting only 5% of my salary to be paid in bitcoin, out of a total $96K per year that I’m making.(We have completely transparent salaries at Buffer, you can take a peek at all of them here).This might increase or decrease over time.The way we make decisions at Buffer is through an iteration called the advice process.We do this since we don’t have any managers and are a fully self-managing team.So if you’re interested in tackling this in your startup, you might not be able to use that exact path, but I hope it might be a good proxy.First, I created a document to list all the pros and cons of getting paid in bitcoin and shared this with the team to get their advice.

Here was the list: The consensus among the team was unanimously positive.A few others also expressed interest in trying to get onboard as well.It definitely helped that most of the team understood bitcoin in some way and many are also fans themselves.I remember during our Thailand retreat in January 2014, when the price of bitcoin was close to its high, having numerous chats with the team about how amazing bitcoin was.Needless to say, my evangelism led to some of the team buying bitcoin right at its top.It’s become an inside joke among the team that whenever I mention bitcoin, it should come with a disclaimer that it’s not investment advice :) We’re incredibly fortunate to have an amazing payroll and finance company, Foresight, to help us out in this regard.They handle our payments & expenses with such speed and joy.Randy is our go-to person for all things Buffer at Foresight.I started the conversation with Randy to see how Foresight might feel in exploring how to get paid in bitcoin: It helped immensely that Randy was open & willing to explore this with us: The tricky situation was to find a method that worked smoothly for both Foresight and Buffer.

Since Foresight is based in the U.S., it opened up few initial options to explore: Coinbase and Circle.Both sites offer easy setup with U.S.bank accounts, which would allow Foresight to purchase bitcoins and then send that amount to me in South Africa.This essentially placed the responsibility on Foresight to hold and manage bitcoins as an additional currency option.Randy went ahead and applied at both Coinbase and Circle.However, both took some time to validate their banking details to start purchasing bitcoin.I did some more research in Coinbase and Circle and realized that neither of them might work as smooth as we’d hope for, especially on Foresight’s side: I then did some more research and discovered a service called BitWage.They are a bitcoin company geared towards payroll services.They understood the challenges involved and had some really interesting products already.One such service is Payroll for the Individual.Here’s how it works: In a way, bitwage acts as an intermediary between me and Foresight.

Foresight then has to make no changes except to add an additional wire transfer.On my side, I can then choose how to receive my bitcoins.I set up an account soon after finding bitwage.We tested things out with a small transfer.It worked incredibly smooth!Randy and I were both extremely happy with this setup.Having Randy explore these options along with me was incredible.I’m very grateful to have such a forward-thinking company help us out.I do realize, however, that not everyone might be so fortunate to be able to explore these options with their employers and/or payroll services.Bitwage, however, especially the Payroll for Individuals, allows you to setup these separate banking details without necessarily having to convince your employer or payroll company.It’s a very risk-free and easy setup for all parties involved.Since I now receive money via an international transfer & bitcoin, it begs the question: how do you handle taxes?Bitcoin is still very young in its development and regulation is still forming.