Reddit wanted to build decentralized site where readers pay posters in bitcoin

Reddit spent some time building a decentralized version of its site last year, with readers paying small amounts of bitcoins to other readers and to posters to read and upvote posts. That has been revealed by a former Reddit employee.

The intention was for Reddit to become a decentralized p2p service, with Reddit apps serving as nodes. Users of those apps would pay a small amount in bitcoin when logging in to users who already have the app open and thus provide them with content. In addition, with each upvote, readers would pay a small amount in bitcoin to the poster, the cryptocurrency engineer who worked on it writes on Medium.

The advantage of a decentralized version of Reddit is that the site is difficult to take offline, because the content is on many different devices via p2p. Moreover, the control no longer rests with a company. The downside is that every user needs and is willing to spend a small amount of bitcoins even to read Reddit. Some of the code already written for the decentralized Reddit is on Github.

The plan was shelved after Reddit announced it wanted to issue its own cryptocurrency for community-owned Reddit shares. The engineer went to work on it, after which the plan for a decentralized Reddit was shelved.

There was a lot of buzz about Reddit last week, when the company fired a popular ama admin, after which many subreddits went black in protest at the current CEO.