[ANN]🔵🔵 OYSTER 🔵🔵 Anonymous Storage Generates Revenue for Websites

[erikalui]

WEBSITE | WHITEPAPER | GITHUB | TRELLO | TELEGRAM | TWITTER

WEBSITE | WHITEPAPER | GITHUB | TRELLO | TELEGRAM | TWITTER

Note: I am not a part of the Oyster team and am not a point of contact for this project. For any questions related to the project, kindly contact brunoblock on Bitcointalk forum or the team members via Telegram.

[brunoblock]

Reserved

[erikalui]

Reserved

[brunoblock]

My name is Bruno and I'm the protocol designer and lead developer for Oyster. Oyster is a true 'two-birds-one-stone' project thats solves easy-access anonymous storage and traffic revenue generation. The Oyster protocol creates a set of network based economic circumstances which causes monetary value to flow from the pockets of those who want to spend on anonymous storage into the pockets of those who want to monetize their web content.

Adverts are distracting and invasive. They take up precious pixel space, often break the content and design continuity of websites, and are rarely politically neutral. Adverts must always be manually interpreted and approved for ethics compliance, therefore the system can never be fully decentralized. A famous example of a website that understands the inherent flaws in banner advertising is Wikipedia.

To illustrate the unseen economic potential of Oyster, imagine the potential revenue generation of Wikipedia. If Wikipedia enabled Oyster it would be able to pay for server costs without having to solicit their users for donations every year (which breaks design/space aesthetics like adverts and financially burdens the users themselves).

Payments to website owners are completely automated and decentralized, therefore no economic leverage is held against them.

If you have any questions please feel free to ask.

[tusandii]

Reserving Indonesian translation

[davidroux]

My name is Bruno and I'm the protocol designer and lead developer of Oyster. Oyster is a true 'two-birds-one-stone' project thats solves easy-access anonymous storage and traffic revenue generation. The Oyster protocol creates a set of network based economic circumstances which causes monetary value to flow from the pockets of those who want to spend on anonymous storage into the pockets of those who want to monetize their web content.

Adverts are distracting and invasive. They take up precious pixel space, often break the content and design continuity of websites, and are rarely politically neutral. Adverts must always be manually interpreted and approved for ethics compliance, therefore the system can never be fully decentralized. A famous example of a website that understands the inherent flaws in banner advertising is Wikipedia.

To illustrate the unseen economic potential of Oyster, imagine the potential revenue generation of Wikipedia. If Wikipedia enabled Oyster it would be able to pay for server costs without having to solicit their users for donations every year (which breaks design/space aesthetics like adverts and financially burdens the users themselves).

Payments to website owners are completely automated and decentralized, therefore no economic leverage is held against them.

If you have any questions please feel free to ask.

hi Bruno. I want ask two question
1. First I see they say want ad-block doesn't block ad anymore by add your code. can you give more detail about this.
2. Second I dont understand how website use our cpu to store data? so we get paid by let website use our computer as I understand ? right?

[jcowle86]

My name is Bruno and I'm the protocol designer and lead developer of Oyster. Oyster is a true 'two-birds-one-stone' project thats solves easy-access anonymous storage and traffic revenue generation. The Oyster protocol creates a set of network based economic circumstances which causes monetary value to flow from the pockets of those who want to spend on anonymous storage into the pockets of those who want to monetize their web content.

Adverts are distracting and invasive. They take up precious pixel space, often break the content and design continuity of websites, and are rarely politically neutral. Adverts must always be manually interpreted and approved for ethics compliance, therefore the system can never be fully decentralized. A famous example of a website that understands the inherent flaws in banner advertising is Wikipedia.

To illustrate the unseen economic potential of Oyster, imagine the potential revenue generation of Wikipedia. If Wikipedia enabled Oyster it would be able to pay for server costs without having to solicit their users for donations every year (which breaks design/space aesthetics like adverts and financially burdens the users themselves).

Payments to website owners are completely automated and decentralized, therefore no economic leverage is held against them.

If you have any questions please feel free to ask.

I love the idea behind this project and I hope you and your team succeed! I have a few questions that hopefully you can answer for me:
1. how do you communicate to users that this is happening and that they want to let you use their CPU/GPU? I know that the pirate bay did something like this just a few weeks ago for alt coin mining. A lot of people where very unhappy about this and felt it was very invasive.
2. (kind of a similar question to 1) how do you ask the users if they want to opt in or not? I assume that there will be an option not to allow the site to use your computer? Otherwise you are forced to not use the site if you don't want this to happen.
3. If a user chooses not to opt in, what would their website experience look like? Would it still have adds then?
4. how will the resources of the computer be evaluated and used? For example if I am on a mobile device vs a desktop how will the website determine how much resources each can provide? And how will you ensure that the users experience is smooth since, depending on how much resources the website uses the computer might start to slow down.

Thanks,

John

[brunoblock]

hi Bruno. I want ask two question
1. First I see they say want ad-block doesn't block ad anymore by add your code. can you give more detail about this.
2. Second I dont understand how website use our cpu to store data? so we get paid by let website use our computer as I understand ? right?

-1. I didn't fully understand your question, but Adblock will still block adverts. When a website adds the Oyster code to their website, they are able to generate financial revenue without having to resort to ads. People who host content on websites need to get paid one way or another, hosting costs money and generating content costs money. Visitors had legitimate complaints that advertisements are intrusive and off-putting, but monetizing traffic via Oyster is silent and hardly noticeable. A website can opt to run both Oyster and advertisements on their website at the same time, the point is that the visitor is given the opportunity to contribute to the website without paying a subscription fee nor dealing with adverts.

-2. This is where the IOTA Tangle comes in, here is their FAQ. Each Tangle transaction, which requires Proof of Work, contains a payload section that can retain data. The website visitor does not get paid, the website owner does. The website visitor benefits from the site content. The social contract of the website is that the website visitor must perform some computational work in exchange for consuming the content.

[brunoblock]

I love the idea behind this project and I hope you and your team succeed! I have a few questions that hopefully you can answer for me:
1. how do you communicate to users that this is happening and that they want to let you use their CPU/GPU? I know that the pirate bay did something like this just a few weeks ago for alt coin mining. A lot of people where very unhappy about this and felt it was very invasive.
2. (kind of a similar question to 1) how do you ask the users if they want to opt in or not? I assume that there will be an option not to allow the site to use your computer? Otherwise you are forced to not use the site if you don't want this to happen.
3. If a user chooses not to opt in, what would their website experience look like? Would it still have adds then?
4. how will the resources of the computer be evaluated and used? For example if I am on a mobile device vs a desktop how will the website determine how much resources each can provide? And how will you ensure that the users experience is smooth since, depending on how much resources the website uses the computer might start to slow down.

Thanks,

John

Hi John, thanks for your questions.

-1. + 2. There will be an option for website owners to activate a small temporary notice, similar to the whole European cookie consent thing. It's up to the website owner if this should be activated or not. Activating it can be as simple as adding data-notice="true" to the one line of javascript. I agree that people would prefer no mining rather than any mining, but there is no such thing as a free lunch and someone needs to pay the hosting and content bill at the end of the day. If people think that they can have their cake and eat it too, it will come back to haunt them in forms like wikipedia begging for donations or article paywalls.

-3. If a user chooses to opt out, the custom policy of the website owner is activated. For example, a website owner might tolerate a maximum of 20% of visitors opting out. The website owner can choose to either allow a warning notice to be displayed, display the content anyways, or disable access completely. Custom interactions can be setup on the visitors side too, for example they can opt out of all Oyster mining or add a whitelist that allows contributions to specific websites despite the general opt out.

-4. There is no reliable technical way to tell the difference between internet connection types such as unlimited broadband or a limited phone data plan. However general internet speed can be deduced via tracking the average latency of connections with other nodes, which helps the algorithm deduce what it's running on. Overall the Oyster protocol has been optimized to consume as little bandwidth as possible, this is mentioned in the whitepaper. It is reasonable to expect that bandwidth wise it would be around the same as loading image and light video advertisements. CPU can also be evaluated with JS, I've done it before for a project a long time ago. It essentially has a loop and if a delay starts occurring for each cycle it knows that the device is being pushed too hard. Therefore upper limits can be hardcoded to ensure the mining never disrupts any user experience.

[jcowle86]

I love the idea behind this project and I hope you and your team succeed! I have a few questions that hopefully you can answer for me:
1. how do you communicate to users that this is happening and that they want to let you use their CPU/GPU? I know that the pirate bay did something like this just a few weeks ago for alt coin mining. A lot of people where very unhappy about this and felt it was very invasive.
2. (kind of a similar question to 1) how do you ask the users if they want to opt in or not? I assume that there will be an option not to allow the site to use your computer? Otherwise you are forced to not use the site if you don't want this to happen.
3. If a user chooses not to opt in, what would their website experience look like? Would it still have adds then?
4. how will the resources of the computer be evaluated and used? For example if I am on a mobile device vs a desktop how will the website determine how much resources each can provide? And how will you ensure that the users experience is smooth since, depending on how much resources the website uses the computer might start to slow down.

Thanks,

John

Hi John, thanks for your questions.

-1. + 2. There will be an option for website owners to activate a small temporary notice, similar to the whole European cookie consent thing. It's up to the website owner if this should be activated or not. Activating it can be as simple as adding data-notice="true" to the one line of javascript. I agree that people would prefer no mining rather than any mining, but there is no such thing as a free lunch and someone needs to pay the hosting and content bill at the end of the day. If people think that they can have their cake and eat it too, it will come back to haunt them in forms like wikipedia begging for donations or article paywalls.

-3. If a user chooses to opt out, the custom policy of the website owner is activated. For example, a website owner might tolerate a maximum of 20% of visitors opting out. The website owner can choose to either allow a warning notice to be displayed, display the content anyways, or disable access completely. Custom interactions can be setup on the visitors side too, for example they can opt out of all Oyster mining or add a whitelist that allows contributions to specific websites despite the general opt out.

-4. There is no reliable technical way to tell the difference between internet connection types such as unlimited broadband or a limited phone data plan. However general internet speed can be deduced via tracking the average latency of connections with other nodes, which helps the algorithm deduce what it's running on. Overall the Oyster protocol has been optimized to consume as little bandwidth as possible, this is mentioned in the whitepaper. It is reasonable to expect that bandwidth wise it would be around the same as loading image and light video advertisements. CPU can also be evaluated with JS, I've done it before for a project a long time ago. It essentially has a loop and if a delay starts occurring for each cycle it knows that the device is being pushed too hard. Therefore upper limits can be hardcoded to ensure the mining never disrupts any user experience.

Thanks for the reply!

I agree there is no such thing as a free lunch, and that it should be expected that there is some way for a website owner to pay to keep the site going. But that is not the same thing as saying that a website owner should just insert that code and not notify them of whats going on. Aside from the fact that this will undoubtedly land them in legal troubles, if there is a demand for the content then people will opt in. Current website monetization schemes such as the surveys are annoying because it interrupts the end goal of getting to the site. Ads are distracting/annoying as you have already pointed out, so I love the solution you have come up with. But please, please do not underestimate the push back you will encounter if you encourage website owners to do this in anything less than a completely open and transparent way. Let the user decide if they are ok with sharing their device resources. if not, either ask for money or give them adds, but don't try and sneak it in and hope they don't notice.

For point 4, i was more specifically asking about the cpu/gpu capabilities of the device but yes the internet connection would also be an important factor. I like that idea of ongoing resource evaluation because if I visited one of these sites and my computer started to slowdown I would probably stop going to that site.

Thanks,

John

[btcdee]

Absolutely fascinating. I am especially curious to learn more how the tangle stores data and will do some research on this. Can Oyster be platform agnostic and migrate to an alternative blockchain/DAG in the unlikely scenario that IOTA fails to deliver a secure environment? I ask this in light of the recent security concerns (or FUD?) brought up by some ETHEREUM developers. Thanks!

[leea-1334]

Wow. It is quite rare to find a new project that can peak my interest in just one post. I doubt I will invest my time into really going into the treasure hunting aspect, but when I think about the habits that I slowly picked up over the years, I can see the real possibility of people adopting this type of service. It may take many years to be successful, but is simple enough to survive and grow as a standalone service.

Next up should be a simple infographic to explain this tangle storage!

[brunoblock]

Thanks for the reply!

I agree there is no such thing as a free lunch, and that it should be expected that there is some way for a website owner to pay to keep the site going. But that is not the same thing as saying that a website owner should just insert that code and not notify them of whats going on. Aside from the fact that this will undoubtedly land them in legal troubles, if there is a demand for the content then people will opt in. Current website monetization schemes such as the surveys are annoying because it interrupts the end goal of getting to the site. Ads are distracting/annoying as you have already pointed out, so I love the solution you have come up with. But please, please do not underestimate the push back you will encounter if you encourage website owners to do this in anything less than a completely open and transparent way. Let the user decide if they are ok with sharing their device resources. if not, either ask for money or give them adds, but don't try and sneak it in and hope they don't notice.

For point 4, i was more specifically asking about the cpu/gpu capabilities of the device but yes the internet connection would also be an important factor. I like that idea of ongoing resource evaluation because if I visited one of these sites and my computer started to slowdown I would probably stop going to that site.

Thanks,

John

Hi John,

I agree that transparency is productive. Oyster enables websites to notify users in a simple way that their CPU/GPU resources are being used in the place of advertisements and paywalls. In the end it is the responsibility of the website owner to perform this at their own discretion, Oyster is completely decentralized and cannot compel nor block any action across the network. The treasure hunting algorithm maintains the economic incentives for nodes to commit the data to the Tangle, but it isn't a centralized force that can compel users to perform various actions. Even if it were programmed to be insistent on transparency (with notifications), the end user could simply remove that part from the javascript without consequence.

[brunoblock]

Absolutely fascinating. I am especially curious to learn more how the tangle stores data and will do some research on this. Can Oyster be platform agnostic and migrate to an alternative blockchain/DAG in the unlikely scenario that IOTA fails to deliver a secure environment? I ask this in light of the recent security concerns (or FUD?) brought up by some ETHEREUM developers. Thanks!

Yes it's possible that it could switch platform. In a worst case scenario it would be simpler to just run an isolated legacy version of the IOTA Tangle.

Yes IOTA has had some issues but they have all been preventative measures, there is nothing broken and they are constantly improving the network. In any case the security of IOTA does not have an effect on Oyster, the data is encrypted by the end user before it reaches the Tangle.

[tansoft64]

I want to reserve for Filipino Translation.

Thanks

[btcdee]

Absolutely fascinating. I am especially curious to learn more how the tangle stores data and will do some research on this. Can Oyster be platform agnostic and migrate to an alternative blockchain/DAG in the unlikely scenario that IOTA fails to deliver a secure environment? I ask this in light of the recent security concerns (or FUD?) brought up by some ETHEREUM developers. Thanks!

Yes it's possible that it could switch platform. In a worst case scenario it would be simpler to just run an isolated legacy version of the IOTA Tangle.

Yes IOTA has had some issues but they have all been preventative measures, there is nothing broken and they are constantly improving the network. In any case the security of IOTA does not have an effect on Oyster, the data is encrypted by the end user before it reaches the Tangle.

Thanks for your answer. This kind of development flexibility installs more confidence in the longevity of your project. Saying that, I'm personally quite heavily invested in IOTA so nothing would make me happier than their success. I will be following your project closely and wish you all the best!

[brunoblock]

NOTICE: All presales have concluded. All PREPRL tokens have been matched with the final PRL token.

[brunoblock]

Wow. It is quite rare to find a new project that can peak my interest in just one post. I doubt I will invest my time into really going into the treasure hunting aspect, but when I think about the habits that I slowly picked up over the years, I can see the real possibility of people adopting this type of service. It may take many years to be successful, but is simple enough to survive and grow as a standalone service.

Next up should be a simple infographic to explain this tangle storage!

Thanks for your comments. Yes more material is being worked on, specifically a live proof of concept demo that illustrates the web node negotiation procedure. The demo explains the procedure in a simple way whilst performing actual GPU based Proof of Work on the Tangle.

[Golftech]

Wow. It is quite rare to find a new project that can peak my interest in just one post. I doubt I will invest my time into really going into the treasure hunting aspect, but when I think about the habits that I slowly picked up over the years, I can see the real possibility of people adopting this type of service. It may take many years to be successful, but is simple enough to survive and grow as a standalone service.

Next up should be a simple infographic to explain this tangle storage!

Thanks for your comments. Yes more material is being worked on, specifically a live proof of concept demo that illustrates the web node negotiation procedure. The demo explains the procedure in a simple way whilst performing actual GPU based Proof of Work on the Tangle.

thats nice to see hear mate more attracting information with considerable and easy to understand conceptualize updates would help the project
to gather much attentions, i'm looking forward to see more people here after your updates those who will gather the attention and take some time to
assess this project too.

[brunoblock]

thats nice to see hear mate more attracting information with considerable and easy to understand conceptualize updates would help the project
to gather much attentions, i'm looking forward to see more people here after your updates those who will gather the attention and take some time to
assess this project too.

Yes there are several proof of concept demonstrations being worked on like exchange negotiation via tangle, data map generation, broker node candle sequence etc.

For now people can read the whitepaper and ask me about anything that they may not understand.