Bitcoin Information Service

[Arthur]

Greetings everyone,

Some friends and I consider ourselves to be excellent obscure information hunters. We have banded together to start a new website called Bit QnA. It will be operating as an information service based on bitcoin bounties.

Basically how it works is you enter a question into the system, and it will be available for our team of experts to answer. A question without a bounty may go unanswered, so if you want to incentivize the experts, a bitcoin address is provided to post a bounty on your question.

If the site becomes popular, we will be looking to fill some more expert positions, and this may give intelligent researchers a good opportunity to earn some bitcoins for themselves. If you would like to be put on the list of potential candidates, see here: http://bitqna.com/become-an-expert

Please give it a try, and send us some feedback! As a special incentive to get things started, there is a free 1 BTC bounty for the 5th and 10th questions entered, a free 2 BTC bounty for the 15th and 20th questions entered; and a free 5 BTC bounty for the 25th question.

Cheers!

[ribuck]

The site seems to function quite well, however when editing my question I get:

Notice: Undefined index: raw in /home/addick/bitqna/bitqna.com/public_html/qa-theme/Bitcoin/qa-theme.php on line 37

[Arthur]

The site seems to function quite well, however when editing my question I get:

Notice: Undefined index: raw in /home/addick/bitqna/bitqna.com/public_html/qa-theme/Bitcoin/qa-theme.php on line 37

Thanks for the bug report, I've fixed it up.

[ribuck]

I got a good answer to my question. But when I went to the site to "award" my bitcoin bounty to that answer, the answer seemed to have already been selected as best answer (by someone else, or by some automatic process), and all mention of my 5 BTC bounty had disappeared from the question page.

[Arthur]

I got a good answer to my question. But when I went to the site to "award" my bitcoin bounty to that answer, the answer seemed to have already been selected as best answer (by someone else, or by some automatic process), and all mention of my 5 BTC bounty had disappeared from the question page.

The Bit QnA system is currently set up so that anyone, even unregistered anonymous users, can ask questions. The bounty is pooled, and is collected without reference to the user so that anyone can contribute to the bounty for any question.

Once questions are submitted to the site, they can be locked by any of our experts to give them some time to answer. Once answered, the bounty is credited as pending status to their account. There is then a quality check of their answer, and if it is deemed to be a good answer, the bounty is released to the expert automatically. If the answer is deemed unsatisfactory by our quality check process, it is released to be answered by another expert.

As there is no bounty to be awarded once the bounty has been released, the bounty information is replaced with the tip address. We could display some information about the bounty that was awarded though; it would probably be good for accountability purposes.

We believe this process protects both the question submitter, and the expert answerer from abuse of the system. If you have any suggestions as to how it may be improved, we would still love to hear them.

[semyazza]

I got a good answer to my question. But when I went to the site to "award" my bitcoin bounty to that answer, the answer seemed to have already been selected as best answer (by someone else, or by some automatic process), and all mention of my 5 BTC bounty had disappeared from the question page.

The Bit QnA system is currently set up so that anyone, even unregistered anonymous users, can ask questions. The bounty is pooled, and is collected without reference to the user so that anyone can contribute to the bounty for any question.

Once questions are submitted to the site, they can be locked by any of our experts to give them some time to answer. Once answered, the bounty is credited as pending status to their account. There is then a quality check of their answer, and if it is deemed to be a good answer, the bounty is released to the expert automatically. If the answer is deemed unsatisfactory by our quality check process, it is released to be answered by another expert.

As there is no bounty to be awarded once the bounty has been released, the bounty information is replaced with the tip address. We could display some information about the bounty that was awarded though; it would probably be good for accountability purposes.

We believe this process protects both the question submitter, and the expert answerer from abuse of the system. If you have any suggestions as to how it may be improved, we would still love to hear them.

It states you take a 4% fee from all bounties.  Can you explain who retains ownership of the content generated. Do you acquire ownership of the content or do you just require the expert to provide a license to use the answer on the site.

[ribuck]

There is then a quality check of their answer, and if it is deemed to be a good answer, the bounty is released to the expert automatically. If the answer is deemed unsatisfactory by our quality check process, it is released to be answered by another expert.

If I'm paying the bounty, I want to be the one to decide whether to award it.

If the answer had not met my needs, I would be angry and upset for BitQnA to pay out the bounty against my wishes.

[Arthur]

It states you take a 4% fee from all bounties.  Can you explain who retains ownership of the content generated. Do you acquire ownership of the content or do you just require the expert to provide a license to use the answer on the site.

Question askers retain full ownership of their questions, answerers retain full ownership of their answers, and everyone retains full ownership of their comments. We at Bit QnA do not take ownership of any content posted to the site.

If I'm paying the bounty, I want to be the one to decide whether to award it.

If the answer had not met my needs, I would be angry and upset for BitQnA to pay out the bounty against my wishes.

I understand what you mean, but I'm not quite sure how I can reconcile this with anonymous and pooled bounties. I'll think about a solution, but it may mean some significant overhaul of how the system is currently working.

For now, if you are dissatisfied with an answer, please post a comment explaining why within one week. It will then fail our quality check, the bounty will be available again, and the question will be reopened for additional answers. I will post an update if I can come up with a better solution.

[ribuck]

I'm not quite sure how I can reconcile this with anonymous and pooled bounties

In the meantime, please reword the notification email, which currently says "If you like this answer, you may select it as the best".

[Arthur]

In the meantime, please reword the notification email, which currently says "If you like this answer, you may select it as the best".

It has been updated. Thanks.

[ArsenShnurkov]

How to receive a bounty for the answer ?

http://bitqna.com/7/how-many-kh-s-gives-the-hd-6990-card

[Arthur]

There seems to be some confusion as to how Bit QnA is operating, and this indicates to us that Bit QnA should have a different structure. We plan to add the ability for any user to answer a question, and the bounty will then be awarded according to the question askers selection.

In order to make these changes, we will need to take the Bit QnA site down for a number of days, but Bit QnA will be back, better than ever.

ArsenShnurkov, please pm me an address to send your bounty to.

[Dude65535]

One problem I can imagine if anyone can answer and the questioner gets to pick the person that gets the bounty.

Person A has accounts X and Y. With account X he posts a question. Person B answers the question. Person A then copies that answer with a slight variation with account Y. Person A then gives the reward from account X to account Y.

[Sawzall]

For a while now the site just says "This site is currently down for maintenance - please come back soon."

[Arthur]

One problem I can imagine if anyone can answer and the questioner gets to pick the person that gets the bounty.

Person A has accounts X and Y. With account X he posts a question. Person B answers the question. Person A then copies that answer with a slight variation with account Y. Person A then gives the reward from account X to account Y.

This is a valid concern. Perhaps it would be better to keep the site as an expert answering service, as I don't think there would be any way to stop someone from doing that otherwise.

We still plan to allow the question asker to choose the best answer for the release of the bounty.

[Dude65535]

The only solution I can think of is to have a dispute resolution team. They could manually check for that behavior if someone disputed the allocation of the reward. Obviously that would up the costs of running the service.

Edit: Providing a history for a questioner would reduce the problem as someone could check for that behavior themselves before answering.