Might be more of a question for the @Alby team

Hey Team THNDR- what are the economics behind the bitcoin rewards? Is it basically sharing ad revenue with your users?

Sounds like Flipboard

love how bitcoin references in rap songs have aged...

"i got 50 bitcoin worth about a hundred grand"

tick tock next block

Thanks! The waitlist is to drive interest before our product is finished and show advertisers we have people ready to see their ads. A big contingency to making UPAID successful is that we get the enough demand partners to participate. The only way that happens is if we have lots of users.

In the signup process, you will be asked what currency you want to earn in and BTC will be there.

@Alby is the best! First Lightning wallet I ever experimented with and still my go to spending wallet for zapping.

Would be happy to share! It’s still a prototype but I could do a walkthrough like I did in the Loom video if that’s cool?

Similar! I am a big fan of what Slice is doing and have been using their extension for over a year now.

The main difference is:

UPAID is trying to get you paid on the existing ads that publishers show you.

Slice is getting users paid on dedicated Slice ad units, not owned by the publishers.

Thanks! Unfortunately, it won’t work with adblockers. The ads people will earn from are publishers’ regular ads.

15 years old and still relevant today- https://time.com/3270666/how-to-save-your-newspaper/

Main takeaways:

-Content should cost money. -Content should not be reliant on subscriptions or ads to make money. -Better micropayments are the solution.

I think this applies to how AI content scraping… there needs to be a standard upfront cost of access to the information + a royalty payment any time the information is used by an end user. No idea how it gets executed though.

Good point on protocol vs payment service- I am definitely tangling those.

Re: Strike, I’m talking about the “send globally” feature. It seems like to send a remittance to someone in one of those countries in their preferred currency, you’re relying on Strike having a banking partner in that country. I know you can send money out of your bank account to any other Lightning account. It’s just the “fiat currency -> BTC -> BTC -> different fiat currency” piece that I can’t tell the difference between UMA and Strike.

I am genuinely trying to learn, not trying to be divisive.

I agree for the long term. I just see UMA as a way for non-bitcoin businesses to start benefiting from faster, cheaper, cross-border payments. By using Lightning as the rails, it entrenches bitcoin so when fiat currencies do eventually lose favor, it should be a seamless transition to sats.

Ya, I have both Strike and Cashapp accounts. I had to KYC with both.

I am not an expert but it seems UMA and Strike are solving the same problem: cross border, multi-currency payments using Lightning payment rails. UMA is trying to do it in a way so any company or institution can use the protocol and create UMA addresses for their users. Whereas, with Strike, in order to do cross border transactions, the sender and receiver need a Strike account or the receiver has to be in a country where Strike has a banking partner. (I am not actually sure about this, but that’s what it seems like.)

Both Strike and UMA allow for bitcoin payments from their user accounts to other Lightning addresses so I find them equally interoperable?

I found some info on it I don’t understand how bolt 12 could send fiat currency if a bank can’t be connected. For businesses that want to get paid in dollars via lightning network, they need the money to come in as dollars and I feel like only a bank connected to lightning can do that for them.

Is there more you can share about it?

That is a fact. Huge 🚩

Fair point on the spec. At least they kept it open source and it’s backwards compatible with non UMA Lightning addresses.

The KYC stuff sucks for sure… it’s just the next step for bringing Lightning payments to the masses. We need to meet them where they are and the vast majority of people are still making payments in their local currencies.

My opinions is, once they start using Lightning payments, it’s just a matter of time before they make the switch to sats.