Ryan X. Charles, co-founder and software engineer of Bitcoin-based content sharing platform Yours, officially introduced the world’s first Bitcoin micropayments web wallet that is structurally similar to Core’s Lightning network.
Upon the introduction of Lightning by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja in 2015, developers and startups saw the first potential of a Bitcoin micropayments system which would allow applications and platforms to rely on the security measures of the Bitcoin network but benefit from increased flexibility and scalability.
Steemit under fire of criticism
Essentially, the Yours micropayments system is like a web browser version of Lightning, customized to be utilized by the Yours content sharing platform. On the platform, users will be able to utilize the micropayments web wallet to incentivize content providers, a little like Steemit but more legitimate, based on a legitimate cryptocurrency.
Steemit is a micropayments-based content sharing platform like Yours, based on a cryptocurrency called Steem. However, due to its illegitimate pre-mining, distribution of funds amongst developers, and irrational distribution of funds, it received criticisms from both the community and experts.
In theory, Yours can be described as a valid version of Steemit, which is built on the unprecedented security of Bitcoin and a proper real market value-based currency in Bitcoin.
Enabling bitcoin micropayments
Over the past 12 months, the Yours development team explored different methods of enabling Bitcoin micropayments. As the release of Lightning continued to be delayed and there is still no ETA for the software, developers at Yours came to a consensus to release its own Lightning-inspired micropayments system.
Prior to Yours, there were several micropayments-based applications like Streamium.io utilizing their own systems to enable low fee and instantaneous payments. However, Ryan X. Charles explains that one major technical issue kept the platform inefficient in terms of scalability and transaction speed.
Charles notes that the Yours micropayments system is a solution to the problems of previous micropayment systems that have failed to scale accordingly.
He stated:
“Our smart contract network solves this problem, making genuine user-to-user micropayments possible in arbitrarily small amounts and with no fees. So, Streamium had micropayments working, but it wasn’t a general purpose micropayments system like ours is.”
With its micropayments-based web wallet ready, which is the main component of the Yours network, the Yours development team is planning a general purpose launch by early 2017.
Charles also stated on social media that the white paper for Yours will be published in the near future.