A new social platform called Yours is enabling micropayments in Bitcoin to compensate content creators. The initiative is spearheaded by Ryan X. Charles, who previously worked as a cryptocurrency engi
A new social platform called Yours is enabling micropayments in Bitcoin to compensate content creators. The initiative is spearheaded by Ryan X. Charles, who previously worked as a cryptocurrency engineer at Reddit. Charles recently sat down with Alex Sterk to discuss the project on an episode of Blocktalk, sharing technical and strategic insights about the platform.
Yours distinguishes itself from earlier Bitcoin-based social networks like Changetip and Zapchain through its commitment to genuine decentralization. Rather than relying on custodial payment processing, the platform grants participants direct ownership of their private keys and complete authority over their funds. This architectural choice reflects a fundamental philosophy about how Bitcoin should function.
The journey toward this implementation reveals the practical challenges of building on blockchain infrastructure. In Yours's initial iteration, all transactions settled directly on the Bitcoin network. This approach provided authentic decentralization but created an unexpected bottleneck. During the platform's early testing phase in April, on-chain transaction costs had risen to approximately five cents. Charles identified the fundamental issue: if the average content reward was also roughly five cents, the fee structure made economic sense impossible. "You're probably better off using dollars if you're going to make it fully centralized because it's just going to be easier for your users if you integrate with Stripe or something like that," Charles noted during the interview, highlighting why pure centralization wasn't the answer either.
Facing this impasse, Yours's team conducted extensive research into Bitcoin micropayment solutions, examining the Lightning Network specification alongside other academic work in the space. Rather than adopting Lightning wholesale, they engineered a custom system tailored to their requirements. Charles described it as a payment channel hub—a single large node through which all transactions route. While superficially similar to Lightning's channel architecture, the implementation functions differently: "It's sort of like the Lightning Network but with only one node." He emphasized that despite the hub terminology, the system remains trustless. The hub neither holds nor controls user funds; it simply facilitates routing between participants.
This micropayments infrastructure consumed the majority of engineering resources for half a year. Charles acknowledged ongoing work remains, particularly around security hardening and performance optimization, though he considers the core technical foundation essentially complete.
The vision for Yours relies significantly on Segregated Witness, a proposed Bitcoin protocol upgrade included in Core 0.13.1 but awaiting network activation. SegWit's primary benefit for payment channel systems involves eliminating transaction malleability vulnerabilities. Currently, Yours's unidirectional channel design necessitates two separate paths to enable bidirectional micropayment flow—a workaround born from malleability concerns. SegWit would reduce this to a single, bidirectional channel. "It's really irritating because now it means there are two payment channels when a real Lightning [channel] would have a sort of double-sided payment channel," Charles explained. He noted that technically, workarounds exist without SegWit, but they compromise security.
Should Segregated Witness face delays in deployment, Yours maintains contingency options. The team would evaluate their security profile to determine viability for launch, potentially implementing interim safeguards like user whitelisting or access fees to mitigate attack vectors. "It is certainly desirable that Segregated Witness launches, so that we just don't have to worry about these issues at all," Charles concluded.
