Hey There!
I built a pastebin with a Lightning mechanics and wanted to run it past this crowd. Let me know what you think :-)
It's an experiment ... Every paste is free to read for its first 60 minutes. After that it gets "caged": the content goes behind a paywall. Anyone can pay 210 sats over Lightning to revive it, and a payment reopens the paste, free for everyone, for another hour. There is no per-payer unlock and no token tied to your payment. Whoever pays lifts the gate for the next person too.
So a paste's life is a chain of free hours, each one bought by whoever wanted it open. If nobody pays, it stays caged; if it is worth reading, someone keeps it lit.
A few specifics:
- Onion-only. Reachable over Tor, never on a clearnet IP. No accounts, no cookies, works with JavaScript turned off.
- Text, an image, or both, up to 16 MB. A caged image paste shows a heavily pixelated preview as a teaser.
- Runs on LND.
- Public gallery, tags, upvotes. Identical pastes dedupe to the original instead of piling up.
It is brand new with zero traffic, so I am not fishing for upvotes. What I actually want to know: does "one payment reopens it for everyone" feel right, or is per-payer access the obvious model and I have talked myself into something odd? And what would you genuinely use a pay-to-read pastebin for?
There's also a creator-payout angle • authors attach a Lightning/Bitcoin address and earn a share. It's live but barely tested, treat it as experimental.
Live over Tor:
faraday2zcmnt5nlreask6xzm3n2v5yuq6zfs6onoiuwlbpgpuo2heqd.onion
Honest Feedback wanted! Is it a stupid idea, should i change something... obv i think it's cool but your opinion matters!
Cool! As I get confronted time and time again by more experienced developers on security stuff, I am starting to become more concerned about what the unknown unknowns are here for those of us diving into the deep end of coding and vibe coding kind of later in life. I hope you've got a good plan to address the concerns others have brought up. I can definitely imagine some really productive non-criminal uses for this, but the security concerns and potential bad guy uses are really scary. It seems to me like the ideal use case would be information that is only needed one time, or by a niche group of people.
That said, this gives me an opportunity to share these private keys I've been trying to capitalize on for the low low price of 210 sats! We'll see if @optimism actually has the audacity to upload my sacred private keys to some interwub archive. :)
Jason's seed phrase for a wallet that definitely has real addresses in it: http://faraday2zcmnt5nlreask6xzm3n2v5yuq6zfs6onoiuwlbpgpuo2heqd.onion/p/YZUcSgfFhF
Sounds like you'd be interested in OneTimeNote, or more simply, Privnote. Why involve a payment?
One immediate scenario that comes to mind for me is a photographer. It'd be like two million sats instead of two hundred, and the platform cut would have to be way less than what @lamplighter is proposing, but photographers do this all the time when they don't have a paying gig. Just show up at some event and send out watermarked photos to the people running it with an offer to sell non-watermarked ones if the potential client likes what they see. That alone is a huge market.
The more I think about it, there are so many things in the real world that would run smoother like this. The barrier with this though is that I don't know a single photographer that wouldn't immediately ask how to put this in quick books. That's been the single biggest response I've gotten from musicians about Direct Current. All my non-bitcoiner friends that are either self-employed or run small businesses are absolutely paranoid about getting in trouble over taxes.
Archived on SN (and in 10 minutes the link will be OTS'd too)
you monster!
out of curioso - only bacon is fine? checksum matches?
Check it out yourself.[1] Apparently @optimism has no respect for the sanctity of my private seed phrase just because I was trying to make an honest 105 sats off of letting people take a voyeuristic gander at my UTXOs. You and everyone else can now take all my bitcoin. 😭
This is probably not a good use of your time. Yes, checksum matches with only bacon on a 24 word BIP-39 seed phrase. No go on 12 words though... ↩
I'm just reiterating what you already said: #605815
Called out!
lol
hahahahhahhaa thanks man :-)
i can make the visible forever, i might do it for free! no 210 sats needed then :-) but let me think hard, i mean, there's some really money on the table (potentially!)
Thanks for the reply. I do share your sentiment and I'm also not sure what people will use it for. I can turn it off if I see content that is not acceptable. Appreciate the reply!
For the record, I personally think what you made is really exciting!
Thanks !!!
The biggest issue you are going to have is once the CP and snuff film people find it. The simple truth is, there isn't much reason for "normal / non-illegal" people to use it, thus its going to solely become a tool for the most evil aspects of humanity.
You need to decide if you want to deal with that.
Well, honestly i'm a bit worried about this, and i know it's maybe selfish but i came across the idea and never really dealt with TOR before so i just wanted to see what happens if a service like this exists... as I said, it's an experiment. So far, there's nothing nefarious going on ... (traffic is very low...)
sounds like u wanna keep sweeping vile shit (i.e. documented evidence) under the rug and hope it resolves itself one day; people thinking like that & doing nothing about it are an issue too, an abomination - the flip side of evil are the ignorant masses;
nevent1qqsv6x3cjm0unzudgjpyggh2zhsn65mntyr64d9wcsp4hsm5ffhxg2czyr07tmu5kgcweag69tdglf72grasd47wrtaykkxgk8veuwl7rjp7yqcyqqqqqqgs6jte3
Yeah it's also what i really think the tradeoff should be. I don't want to be responsible to share stuff that genuinely shouldn't be shared, but i'm also not thinking i should be the one controlling it either... time will tell what if ever will be posted there and if it's getting out of hand i'll do an rm-rf /faraday and call it a day.
Congratulations on shipping!
Which audience did you have in mind? Onion-only and no JavaScript sound privacy-focused, but you also mentioned content creators and a payout scheme. A combination of both?
If you want to continue this experiment, and I'd encourage experimenting, I think that would be a good thing to clarify. Just from reading your post, it wasn't clear to me, so I don't think I am the target audience, at least.
honestly i don't know.. I'm one who just tries to find uses for lightning .. I love lightning... I think Bitcoin is the greatest invention after (before?) the clock. Fire?
i want to see what i can find in terms of services that can work that instill my beliefs- freedom and freedom of speech. individuality. i also never did anything on TOR so this is my first foray into it, and curious what, if anything, sticks.
i'm also trying to advocate people to speak their mind to not be censored. I like freedom until where it can cause harm. I'm an idealist in ways but maybe not others. I'm old.
As i said, an experiment...
This is very, very important.
Paywalls suck.
But this is a good idea
And this is a poor idea. I'll just pay the sats -> copy within the hour -> now both you and the author have lost income. WBM and archive.today attract top-ranked traffic for a reason.
The largest share, right?
Thanks man, appreciate your feedback. Yeah it's an experiment... Somehow i want it to pay for some of the infra... But yeah I get it, paywall sucks. (though the sats required are VERy economic)
do answer your 2nd Q, every time it's unlocked, 50% go to the original poster... what do you think I should change?
Are you sure? 210 sats per hour is currently about the same cost as highest-tier Amazon S3 storage per GB per month - so at 16MB limits you're only 45000x as expensive as Amazon's top offering.
Shifting the expense consumer side instead of provider side doesn't change the cost basis.
Yes i didn't think of this, but i also don't really want to compare it to file / web hosting :-)