In this update we talk about how your AirTime is counted and how you can increase your daily AirTime rewards by staking. We are also excited to introduce AirShare for peer-to-peer file sharing and more great stuff in this next release.

Staking for more AirTime

How is my online activity being rewarded?

You generate AirTime for yourself and publishers while actively browsing the Internet with the BitTube browser extension. Based on your AirTime you receive TUBE rewards daily. You may have noticed that your dashboard shows both “AirTime” and “counted AirTime”. This is because AirTime is weighed based on cumulative activity throughout the day. Most of the time, your “counted AirTime” is about half of your total daily activity. This difference increases the longer your online sessions become:

This where user account levels come in. Upgrading your account level will increase your counted AirTime and daily rewards for you and the websites you visit.

Account levels and staking for users

AirTime requires either mobile verification or staking 2500 TUBEs to be considered verified and eligible for the “AirTime Basic” level. You can upgrade to “Pro” or “Addict” levels which increases your total billable activity. The necessary staking amount depends on whether your account has gone through mobile verification. Being mobile verified means staking an extra 2500 or 25k TUBEs to unlock the Pro or Addict level, respectively. Foregoing mobile verification (out of privacy concerns, for example) requires 25k or 250k TUBEs to unlock these higher AirTime levels. The staking amounts are high by design, to protect the system against abuse from non-human accounts.

User levels billable AirTime.

Billing factor (counted AirTime)

The “billing factor” in the above chart depicts how much a user’s AirTime is weighted according to their cumulative activity throughout the day. It is an essential spam prevention measure, making it economically unfeasible for non-human accounts (bots, click farms) to compete against normal human browsing behavior on a 24-hour basis. For example, the chart shows that the default “Basic" level counts only the first 2 hours (of your activity, not of your day) with a 1:1 weight. After this, increasingly less of your AirTime is counted towards rewards with each following hour, the maximum theoretical “counted AirTime” being only 5 hours based on 24 hours of continuous activity (bottom left chart). The “Pro” and “Addict” AirTime levels significantly increase the amount of maximum counted AirTime per day to roughly 9 and 14 hours. To the power users among you who sit behind a desk all day, upgrading your account will have a noticeable effect on rewards.

Staking for publishers

Earlier this month we introduced the AirTime module. It allows publishers to earn from their guest visitors (i.e. users without the AirTime extension). As you might imagine, much stricter billing factors are applied to these users, since we are limited in verifying the legitimacy of each guest. Just like users, publishers have the ability to increase the counted AirTime from their guests by staking.

AirTime module billing factor.

The AirTime levels for publishers start at ”Free Trial” with an initial 10% billing factor which anyone is free to implement. It goes all the way up to the “Business” level, requiring 1 million TUBEs to unlock the maximum AirTime potential for each guest. The billing factor applies per guest who is identified by the system as unique across all AirTime-enabled websites. The “Verified” staking levels of 125k and above (bottom 4 graphs) will require KYC. This is meant for additional spam protection, as well as building an exclusive portfolio of trusted publishers. The biggest takeaway for publishers is that they are highly incentivized to convert their visitors into BitTube extension users, as they produce considerably more AirTime revenue compared to guests. Publishers should also realize that the dollar value of the TUBEs they earn is held up by utility, distribution and most importantly demand, which are the pillars of the browser extension. Later this year we plan to introduce advanced features for the AirTime module. For example, a paywall option that will allow you to set up on-demand content and premium pages on your website. For publishers powered by AirTime, this type of functionality will enable easy, universal, cross-platform paywall access for BitTube users based on micropayments or subscriptions.

How do I stake?

In the “My wallets” page in the extension you will find a “Staking” tab. Your “Online Wallet” is your user wallet where staking increases your individual AirTime. The “Platform name” wallets are meant for publishers who have registered their platform with the AirTime module.

After you stake the desired amount, it will be locked for 30 days. When the first 30-day period ends, your stake will be auto-renewed with a 14-day time window to withdraw. After that, your stake will be locked for the remainder of the 30-day cycle, and so forth. All subsequent cycles will have a 14-day window to withdraw. Note: the locking period is for each transaction, based on the age of the transaction.

Creating the Staking wallet

The staking funds will be stored on a dedicated wallet issued explicitly to upgrade your account level or AirTime module. The staking wallet uses a multi-signature address that can be operated only by 2 private keys. The use of a multi-signature wallet creates an additional layer of security to the staked funds and allows BitTube to lock the coins for established periods.

To generate a private key, you can choose between “Simple generation” where BitTube creates the address and gives you your private key, or an advanced option “Generate yourself” where with the help of a BitTube client you create the address and provide the keys to the system.

After creating the staking wallet, you have to deposit the required amount to obtain a certain level. Unlocking the deposit will be possible after the end of the first 30 day period upon withdrawal request.

Module stats

To see precisely how much AirTime your linked (social) accounts and registered platforms are generating, we’ve now added a new dedicated statistics tab!

Enhanced buy TUBEs option

Every donation button now includes a “Buy TUBEs” option where a sidebar popup will show all available payment methods. The donation amount will be represented in the fiat currency set in your extension profile.

The sidebar offers fast and easy way to get some TUBE in your balance. Later on this functionality will be implemented as an option for guest on websites with integrated AirTime module.

Introducing AirShare

Who needs clunky cloud storage solutions when you can share files instantly and peer-to-peer? Welcome to AirShare! Share unlimited files with anyone and start your decentralized torrent network with our open source solution based on the WebTorrent protocol.

Check it out at airshare.bittubeapp.com. You can drag and drop any file and you seed it as long as the browser tab is open. It’s open source and we encourage anyone to implement it inside their own website by just copying a few folders to their host. Next, register the AirTime module to generate TUBEs when visitors are seeding and downloading, and you’ve got yourself a purely decentralized peer-to-peer, monetized file sharing economy. These are the true building blocks of censorship-resistant content sharing.

The AirShare application is optimized for performance and is more lightweight than the stock WebTorrent code base. All generated URL hashes (the characters following the # symbol) can be used with any other WebTorrent based client such as instant.io.

Like BitTube’s CEO says:

What I really love in this file sharing service is, that compared to many others there is no upload to any server, the users seed it by themselves and anyone who keeps the page open seeds also.

Welcome to pure decentralization!

The main reason for developing the AirShare system was to provide more freedom and additional protection layers for the content on the upcoming BitTubers Social Hub platform (bittubers.com). Since any platform, including ours, will have reasons (but more importantly, the means) to remove posts containing certain content (be it illegal or for violating copyright or guidelines), AirShare provides protection for censored content for as long as the author or other users are seeding it, transferring the burden of accountability to the users. Like Jordan Peterson says: take responsibility and it will set you free.

The BitTubers Social Hub is expected to release in early beta at the end of Q2, where the current bit.tube video platform will migrate to the new network.

Building towards a better Internet

With each passing day we move closer to providing everyone with the building blocks that give back the freedom and autonomy on the Internet that is sorely needed in this modern world. We’re looking at you, Article 13.

Can’t wait for the next update!

Your BitTube Team