Yours Network abandoned Bitcoin and switched to Litecoin. I burst into tears after knowing the truth.

The decentralized social media app Yours is about to be officially launched on May 30th. However, the company’s CEO Ryan X Charles suddenly announced a major change in its strategy - Yours’ infrastructure will switch from Bitcoin to Litecoin.

Charles wrote in his blog post:

Yours' mission is to improve the quality of content on the Internet, and we believe that the best way to do this is to connect content creators directly with consumers and eliminate subscriptions and third-party advertising. We have launched an invitation-only preview version of Yours and plan to launch it in full on May 30th.

To enable micropayments in the $1 range, we can’t just use Stripe, because Stripe’s transaction fees are around 30 cents or more, and a $1 payment to the author costs the payee 31 cents, 97% of which goes to Stripe. So we developed a micropayment solution based on Bitcoin. Our solution is similar to the Lightning Network, but it doesn’t rely on Segregated Witness. We are the only team working on micropayments on Bitcoin today. The Yours Network has a minimum transaction cost of 0, allowing true micropayments of $1 or even lower.

However, in the past few years, some changes have taken place in Bitcoin. The demand for Bitcoin transactions has increased greatly, while the maximum value of Bitcoin blocks is still limited to 1 MB. Therefore, transactions must compete to enter the block. This has increased the transaction cost on the chain from about 5 cents to 1 dollar. It has increased 20 times in one year.

Since our technology is based on payment channels, we have to conduct on-chain transactions. Given the average transaction size in the Yours system, this costs about $3. This means that consumers cannot deposit $1 into our system because it cannot even meet the Bitcoin transaction fee. If users want to use this system, they have to put in more money. Assuming that users deposit $10 into the system, the average payment fee in the channel is 30%, and to reach the level of Stripe or PayPal, users need to deposit $100. This is uncomfortably high for a product like Yours that targets a wide audience and has a low barrier to entry.

However, Bitcoin transaction fees are still rising rapidly. Therefore, we have no choice but to switch to Litecoin before launching it. Litecoin also has a large economy, and our technology can be applied to Litecoin with almost no modification. We also like Ethereum, but Ethereum and Bitcoin are very different, so we can't switch easily. Litecoin is very similar to Bitcoin in technology.

Litecoin currently has transaction fees of just a few cents, which means that a user can easily load $1 on our network with negligible transaction fees. Compared to Bitcoin's $100, this is a much lower barrier to entry. Therefore, applications are 100 times better on Litecoin than on Bitcoin.

We are currently in the process of migrating Yours infrastructure from Bitcoin to Litecoin. We would like to thank the litecore developers who helped us simplify the migration.

Mainstream applications like Yours will allow a global audience to discover the economic freedom of blockchain technology. Both on-chain and off-chain scaling are necessary to achieve this vision. In the long term, Litecoin will also encounter the problems that Bitcoin currently has because it also has a block size limit. We intend to research two chains to promote on-chain and off-chain scaling.

What do you think?