If you've been following Bitcoin cash related news, the "Social network over Bitcoin" concept (and implementations) has been a thing for the last couple of weeks. First memo.cash came out. Then a couple of days later, another protocol named Blockpress launched.

And I believe these are just the beginning. Just imagine what people will come up with once the OP_RETURN limit jumps up from 80 bytes to 220 bytes next week after the hard fork. I've already heard many interesting ideas being tossed around such as a Bitcoin powered uncensorable Pirate Bay for serving magnet links, but there are so many other ideas I can imagine as well.

Because I believe in the power of these OP_RETURN transactions, I built a simple global realtime newsfeed for all OP_RETURN transactions. It's called Chainfeed and here's what it looks like:

Due to the nature of the project I had the opportunity to get a good insight into what kind of human readable data people are posting to the blockchain in realtime. Of course we have memo.cash and blockpress so far, but there was one I wasn't expecting. This one interesting use case I found was none other than:

Yours.org

The gray caption that says "yours.org" is the OP_RETURN message. My speculative interpretation here is:

yours.org makes a transaction every certain interval. I'm guessing these are payouts to the authors when other users tip them. The payout can be a single input transaction but in many cases they are batched as multiple inputs (thats's why you see multiple "sender" avatars), maybe to save the transaction fee as well as for efficiency. The most interesting part is the fact that they're even using OP_RETURN to begin with. I have guesses here as well. Maybe this is for time-stamping to keep track, and to let the writers know that the tip is coming from yours.org and not some random account?

Because yours.org transactions make up a huge portion of the OP_RETURN feed (Feel free to head over to chainfeed.org to check it out now), I really wanted to find a way to present these transactions in a more meaningful manner in the feed, but because all they contain is the uniform "yours.org" there wasn't much I could work with.

But during the process I did come up with a couple of ideas I would like to share, all of them having to do with the question of: What if instead of just "yours.org", the message had more meaningful metadata?

1. "Like" Activity

For the tipping payout transactions, what if instead of just the "yours.org" text, share a set of short unique ids that can be mapped back to the original yours.org article links? This way we could have an activity feed of all the "likes" and "tips" for yours.org articles on the blockchain.

[EDIT] I just checked after publishing this very article and looks like yours.org already maintains this "short" hash version. For example the following URL:

gets redirected to:

So this makes even more sense!

Since yours.org already includes OP_RETURN outputs for these transactions, this proposal doesn't introduce any more cost than today. Simply by adding more metadata to the transaction that they're already paying for (Really, anything but just "yours.org" please), we can immediately get a better glimpse into what links were popular at certain point in time. Also the writer can get a much richer notification about the activities. Instead of a simple "someone just sent you a tip" , they will know straight from their wallet "someone tipped you for your post X" .

2. Publish Event

We could go one step further and use OP_RETURN not just for tipping, but also to give an option for authors to use it as a syndication mechanism. Here's how it might work:

The writer writes an article on yours.org. When it's time to publish the article, there's an option on the website to "broadcast to the blockchain" . If the writer chooses that option, a small amount of OP_RETURN specific transaction fee is deducted from the user's account. This should be seamless since every writer on yours.org already has a wallet connected, and many writers may have already earned enough Bitcoins in their account through tips received from previous articles. This small transaction fee won't be a big deal for most of them who write quality content. Once the "broadcast a publish event" is selected, yours.org could send a transaction to the blockchain that contains the published link as OP_RETURN metadata. All the readers who previously subscribed to the writer will instantly learn about the new published article by subscribing to the protocol's bloom filter in their wallets or through services like chainfeed.org .

A Decentralized RSS, powered by Bitcoin

The interesting point here is that it works like RSS, but without a server. It's completely powered by Bitcoin.

And depending on how the subscribers decide to monitor the feed, some people can get realtime notifications about these various events through 0-confirmation transactions. While 0-confirmation transactions have a spectrum of reliability in monetary transactions, it is extremely relevant in this case because money is not what's important in this case, but the data.