Yours is like Medium with a pay wall. Our mission is to improve the quality of content on the internet and we believe getting creators and curators paid directly from consumers with no subscriptions and no third-party advertisements is the best way to do this. We have launched an invite-only preview and are planning the full launch on May 30.

To make micropayments of one cent, we can’t just use Stripe. Because Stripe’s fees are about 30 cents or higher, a one cent payment to a creator would cost 31 cents and 97% of the money would go to Stripe. So we have developed a micropayments solution on bitcoin. Our solution is like the lightning network, but is not dependent on segwit. We are the first and only group to demonstrate a working routed micropayment on bitcoin today. The marginal cost of a transaction on our network is zero, allowing genuine micropayments of one cent or lower.

However, something changed over the past year on bitcoin while we developed our technology. Demand for bitcoin transactions has increased and the maximum block size has remained arbitrarily limited to one megabyte. So transactions have to compete to get into a block. This has resulted in an increase in the cost for on-chain transaction fees from about five cents to about one dollar. That’s a 20-fold increase in just one year.

Since our technology is based on payment channels, we have to create on-chain transactions to onboard and offboard users. Given average transaction sizes on our system, this costs about $3. This means a consumer can’t just put $1 onto the system, because that would not even cover the cost of the bitcoin transaction fees. Users would have to put far more money onto the system to make the fees worthwhile. If the user puts $10 into the system and the channel is primarily for spending, that means the average fee is 30%. In order to reach competitive levels with Stripe or PayPal, the user would have to deposit $100. That is uncomfortably high for a consumer product intended to reach a wide audience with low barrier to entry.

And fees are still rising quickly. As such, we have had no choice but to investigate switching to an altcoin before launch. Litecoin has a large economy and our technology works on litecoin with almost no changes. We like ethereum too, but ethereum is too different from bitcoin for us to easily switch. Litecoin has the best combination of economic size and technical similarity to bitcoin.

On Litecoin, transaction fees are only a few cents. This means users can comfortably load only $1 onto our network while still paying negligible fees. This is a radically lower barrier to entry compared to $100 for bitcoin. Litecoin is one hundred times better for our application today than bitcoin.

We are currently migrating our infrastructure from bitcoin to litecoin. We would like to thank the developers of litecore, a litecoin-based fork of BitPay’s bitcore, for making this easy for us. (Thank you for fixing this bug in particular which prevented us from switching to litecoin until now.)

Mainstream apps like Yours will be how a global audience finds economic freedom with blockchain technology. Both on-chain and off-chain scaling will be necessary to achieve this vision. Long-term, litecoin will have the same problem as bitcoin because it too has a limited block size. We intend to help with R&D on both chains to facilitate on-chain and off-chain scaling. Lessons learned on one chain can be applied to the other.

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