[Announce] Bitquestion - bitcoin powered questions and answers

[wladston]

Just released a new feature to the site -- accepting zero confirmations!

Now you can see funds posted on your account almost immediately after you send your transaction. And you can use then to ask questions!

A question created with zero confirmation funds will be on the pending state, and will not receive any answers proposals. The question will show only on the "Recent" list. After funds used to create the question have one or more confirmation, the question will automatically move to the open state as usual.

And you can only withdraw funds that have 6 or more confirmations, now.

So now it's even safer for Bitquestion, and blazing fast for all of you to ask your question!

[wladston]

just released answer proposal voting. Hope you guys enjoy.

[wladston]

Since the service hasn't received that much traffic these days, for the past weeks we were out interviewing people to find out what we could improve on. And we have a few changes:

* Now you can follow a tag, and get a special notification each time someone asks a question with that specific tag.
* You can also be notified for EVERY new question that is posted.
* We now charge a flat fee for our service.

So if your question is worth BTC 100 or BTC 0.1, the fee will be the same - just BTC 0.05.

If you have any other suggestion, please share it with us.

[frisco2]

Great idea, thanks. I'm gonna think of a good question to ask.

[wladston]

Just dropped our fee entirely to ZERO. We are not going to charge anything from our users!

[wladston]

We just added a video to our front page : http://bitquestion.com/landing/

Also deployed several layout changes, the site should be cleaner and more organized now.

What do you guys think ?

[Lip]

What do you guys think ?

Congrat. The new design is great. The video is nice too. Who made that video? It based on a payed template?

[wladston]

Thanks Lip. A friend of mine made the video, from the scratch, I believe.

[vv01f]

i doan liek the accounting of your service - where is the problem doing all of that with signed messages or just the bitcoinaddresses.

especially the answers do not need to be by registered persons, the can deliver the answer and an address which can be paid to if the answer is regarded as good enough.

another thing is: when answers are valid but the questioner does reject them all, noone is paid but the question was answered - what about that?

[wladston]

i doan liek the accounting of your service - where is the problem doing all of that with signed messages or just the bitcoinaddresses.

Just signed messages ? Who would receive such signed messages, and where would they be stored ? How would they be published? I think *just* signed messages and addresses would not be enough, because there must be a carrier for such messages. I might be wrong of course. Could you explain how would such system work ?

especially the answers do not need to be by registered persons, the can deliver the answer and an address which can be paid to if the answer is regarded as good enough.

I agree partially with you, that's why I only ask for a username/email/password. The problem is that people just might just start sending random strings to the service, and the asker will have to deal with that influx of weird data, with is bad. We're currently facing this problem, and we are thinking on how that could be solved. Possibly we might need to better identify our repliers.

another thing is: when answers are valid but the questioner does reject them all, noone is paid but the question was answered - what about that?

That's why we take control of the bounty before publishing the question. Since we have control of the bounty, it will just sit at the question forever. In that situation, the asker would receive negative review on his actions, and still would not get the money back. Game theory makes me believe a sane asker would not do that.

[vv01f]

Probably I am bad in describing..

starting point was:
I just saw the topic and thought, OK gonna answer some questions for BTC.. klicked on answer, and ... oh, have to register - for what?! just want to answer and type in the address to be paid for that. You want my email-address - why, I doan need any spam!?

Just signed messages ? Who would receive such signed messages, and where would they be stored ? How would they be published? I think *just* signed messages and addresses would not be enough, because there must be a carrier for such messages. I might be wrong of course. Could you explain how would such system work ?

We  want (I'd really like prolly as optional feature ) valid addresses and proof of ownership for not needing accounts on your site. To verify ownership of an address (which could be used to login without anything like a password, email or any other id) you might crypt a message (or hash of the answer) with the privkey.
Of couse not sole messages but with the pubkey (btcaddress) to enable verification to anyone. That way the answerer can proofe the address he attached to the questioner and that it is owned by him, and he can also proofe for other answers afterwards. Also the function to sign messages is included in bitcoin.org-client.
And noone shall post and sign with an invalid address for reasons of spam because he wants to receive the coins.

an example of account-avoiding is implemented in pyramining. you login with the pubkey of the "online-wallet" and for spam reasons there is a captcha. This also could solve the same for questioners, answerers wont need such a "online-wallet"-pubkey but their own (possibly offline) one.

My point simply is: passwords, email etc. are vulnerable. I doan see why making your service less secure if you like to have trust by users. E.g. bitcoin.de only has a username/password/withdrawallimit to save you from account-stealings, bitmarket.eu was getting better but shows the reset password as debug-info to anyone who asks. Mt.Gox asks for more personal information of users (utilities bills etc.) due to financial restrictions regardless of juristiction or absent problems.
Such flaws can be avoided and save you very much time and bad user-experience. Also I think that would make the service much more popular if you can solve the other problems (e.g. by voting).

[knight22]

you should announce your website in the newbe section to get more traffic.

[wladston]

Thanks knight22, just refreshed my older post at the newbies section: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=84142.0

[wladston]

vv01f, I wanted the email address because that's the easiest way for most people to notify someone, if the answer was rejected, accepted, or if more clarification was asked. One can still disable all email notifications in the notification settings.

I could indeed implement authentication via bitcoin address private key, but for most people, that would make the site harder to use. It's very hard to convince any of my friends to use the site, because first of all the person must at least have some Bitcoin. The site has almost no users now. Most people I know haven't even heard of Bitcoin. If I were to ask them to cryptographically sign messages with their bitcoin's address private key... they would probably run in despair  

It would be indeed brilliant if I could remove the authentication layer on my end with signing. Maybe if Bitcoin becomes more popular, or if Bitquestion grows enough to justify the coding hours I would need to make that feature. At the current pace, I would try to implement SSL and a two-step authentication, if I were to increase the site's security. That would be cheaper to implement, and would not make the site harder to use for people that don't know Bitcoin.

Now, my focus is to understand how people get information from others, and how I could help this process using Bitcoin. The site is still a beta, and I work on it in my spare time (I got a main job that actually pays the bils). So I'm tackling the most basic stuff now (like voting).

[wladston]

Oh, and if you want to buy the domain bitquestion.com or the site logo, or even the whole codebase, I'm selling for cheap!

[vv01f]

I guess if you make it an auction (just set up your rules and starting price, be sure to offer escrow for more bids and announce it early enough) this could at least sell.
but as the site is not exactly popular, you cannot expect it to sell quite well.

my original point was: if you want good answers, you will find them with people that like privacy. email etc. should still be possible as an option.

[wladston]

vv01f, thanks

Well, I don't think there are going to be any bids, since the site generates zero revenue, so that's why I'm not going to make an auction.

My largest mistake was indeed to architecture the website without any regard for the needs and preferentes of the early bitcoin users.

[wladston]

Sure!

There are about 35 visits per day, see http://postimg.org/image/mcmiwsv65/

There are many registered users (403), but only 65 ever either made a comment, or tried to answer a question, or created a question.

Oh, and all the code is based on python/django, and djangobitcoin. I coded all of it myself.

[Abdussamad]

My largest mistake was indeed to architecture the website without any regard for the needs and preferentes of the early bitcoin users.

Can you explain what you mean by that? It seems to me that you didn't do enough promotion.

[wladston]

@ribuck, thanks I even made the layout myself (HTML/CSS). Security was my greatest concern. Checking the logs, many tried to hack the site, fortunately no one managed to. The only problem was the lack of SSL.

I think the problem was the way that I presented the system. Had I planned it to be a platform where you can offer your consulting, maybe it would have taken off. I can imagine a version of the site, that would make much more success, focusing on offering a lot of value, both for experts and for people doing research or in need for help. Maybe one day I'll rebuild the site from ground zero considering that, in the future.

Using Bitcoin was indeed one of my biggest mistakes. I could not invite a single friend to use it (and still can't, I don't know anyone in person that have got any bitcoin). Most people would find it very interesting, but they just weren't able to ask a question because they didn't even know what bitcoin is. So most people subscribed there to answer questions. If you post a question there, you'll see it answered really fast.

Another problem was letting everyone reply. I should have picked a few select people and maybe made the right to answer questions invite-only...

Anyways...