RE: chainBB v0.3.0 - social feed, following, and forum subscriptions

[sadekj]

Nice project. I am going to try it.
I have some questions if you don't mind:

1- How are you funding this? And how are you planning to make money out of this? In short: what is your business model?

2 - How are you going to guarantee the security of the users' accounts and keys? I mean, we will be using our user and private key to login. How do we know they are safe?

Comments

[sadekj]

Update: I have just read the FAQ and found the answers to some of my questions. They are in summary:

1- Funding: not mentioned.
Making money: the ChainBB will take 15% of the rewards of every post created on it!

The chainBB beta forums located at beta.chainbb.com are running under the following rewards model: 60% Author, 25% Curators, 15% chainBB

That is too much for me! Anything more than 5% is a deal breaker

2- No guarantee of safety is mentioned. You need to trust them. But the good thing is that they only require your Posting Private key. This key is only used for posting actions. It can not be used for wallet actions. Moreover, they do NOT store the key. It is stored on your browser cache.

[jesta]

5% wouldn't be enough to pay my cost of living, let alone an entire team to really push this project forward. 10% is the number I am aiming for, which could cover me and probably a few part time contractors. I went up 5% more to 15% in advance so I had 5% wiggle room and some space to allocate funds to community owners without having to hike the rate in the future.

If I had a mountain of cash like steemit.com had, I wouldn't be using this feature at all. Unfortunately though, I don't have a ton of money, just some time and skills to try and make this happen. I know I already responded to your other post, but figured I'd leave a couple more thoughts here.

[sadekj]

Thank you for the extra clarification.

How did you decide that 5% is too low? How many articles do you expect to be written on your platform? It is not the percentage only that matters. Volume is much more important.
I think if you lower the %, you will get a much higher volume and your income will be much more.

My 2 cents, wishing you the best of luck.

[jesta]

You're absolutely right, the volume is what matters the most.

Here's some assumptions and goals I based the calculations on:

• An initial milestone is to capture 10% of the overall network traffic (10% of posts originating from chainBB, currently hovering around 1%)
• 15% of those rewards split off to chainBB (with a portion of that going to community owners, let's say 5% for this example).
• Pre-HF19 the rewards pool was ~50k/day (which is when this math was done).

So if we say 10% of daily rewards (50k * 10% = ~5k/day/value) is what the users are generating via chainBB, and 10% of that value goes to chainBB via beneficiaries, that's around 5k * 10% = ~500/day/value that chainBB can generate. 500/day is roughly 182k/year in earnings, which is enough for:

• 1 (maybe 2) full time developers
• 2-3 small contract developers/designers
• Hosting Costs

Looking at 5% in this equation, you can basically cut it all in half. So 5% rewards @ 10% of network traffic would be ~90k/year, which would include a pretty low developer salary after hosting costs and some contract work are removed.

All of this thought was pre-hf19 (when distribution was stable) and assuming STEEM is approximately $1.5. Currently after HF19 the rewards pool is unstable and I'm waiting for it to become stable before I rework the math - it's fluctuating pretty wildly right now.

[sadekj]

Your calculations are reasonable. But you should take some factors into consideration:

1 - Steem is expanding daily and the number of users and posts is booming and expected to continue like that.
2 - After hf19, the rewards has increased dramatically.

Best of luck.

[jesta]

Both are true currently, but not guarantee's for the future.

1. This may cause me to relook at numbers, but it has to happen first. The same also applies in a situation where STEEM is now $5 or $50.
2. I have concerns with how this is playing out, the rewards pool is actually draining at a significant pace and I don't think the increased rewards we're seeing is going to last for much longer. Currently we're seeing 150k+ days of payouts, and the rewards pool itself has decreased by approximately 40% in the last week (from 1.8mm STEEM to 1.1mm STEEM today). There's still only ~50-60k being added daily to that pool, so I don't think it's going to be much higher than that in a couple weeks.

Thanks for engaging me on these topics - they're important discussions and I really appreciate the thought you're putting forth towards this!

[johnbakare]

clear on that wish he gets it and work true

[jesta]

Thanks, and I don't mind at all. I've answered a few of these things already in other posts - but it's so hard to keep on top of things the information just needs to be repeated :)

1. It's funded using the post reward beneficiaries system build into the STEEM blockchain. Any post made through chainBB has it's rewards divided as such: 60% author, 25% curators, 15% chainBB. steemit.com's reward model is similar at 75% author and 25% curators. This is the primary funding source for chainBB and the funds are viewable on the @chainbb account. I also plan on selling "hosting" essentially - allowing user's to run custom forums, domains, permissions, etc all within the server infrastructure I'm setting up, as well as potentially some other subscription type purchases. The reason 15% was chosen was because I don't want to raise it again, and at some point, I want to share a portion of that 15% with those running forums on the chainBB engine.
2. Your keys actually never leave your browser, and aren't saved remotely on any of my servers. When you vote/post/etc on chainBB, you're actually submitting directly through the blockchain and not through any chainBB service. chainBB itself is an indexer and is read only, with an STEEM interface laying on top of it. So that's the first layer of protection. Second up, I only accept posting keys for chainBB, which have no access to anything critical on your account (aka funds). In the scenario where someone does compromise chainBB somehow and manages to get the key from your browser, the worst case scenario is they can post and vote as you now.

Hope that covers your questions well!

[sadekj]

Hope that covers your questions well!

Yes it does.
Thank you, and I hope you the best of luck.