Boardz update turns forum posts into a real economy with BSV

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Bulletin board/forum app Boardz is using the power of BSV micropayments to build an economy around information sharing. A new update published this week adds new options to “monetize communities” with subscriptions, donations, and tipping. Coming soon is also the ability to add paywalls to posts within communities.

It’s free to sign up for a Boardz account with a regular email, or you can log in with a HandCash wallet and use that interface for payments. It’s necessary to connect a RelayX wallet (separate from the HandCash login) to use Boardz’s NFT features. The development team hopes the size of their small-payments “information economy” will grow along with users. They also plan to introduce the “Rewardz” program to incentivize those early users to get things started with quality posts.

The Boardz format and layout will be familiar to anyone who’s used online bulletin boards in the past, from old-style forums to Reddit or StackExchange. There’s already a healthy range of topics to post about, and although volumes currently skew towards Bitcoin and other technology/development topics, pretty much any subject of interest is available for new threads.

How can Boardz users earn with communities and posts?

The main difference between Boardz and existing bulletin board sites is the ability to process fast and cheap blockchain payments—and the feeling you’re using a product, rather than existing as one. Unlike other boards, users can also earn their own income by creating popular threads.

In a post (to Boardz) titled “Let the information economy begin!” the development team wrote:

“Boardz is about hyperbitcoinization. Bitcoinization of every topic and every community. The limit is your imagination. All organized in an ad-free, well-categorized social information market integrated with Bitcoin payments. It will change how all forum systems work in a few years.”

Users can now create their interest-based communities with subscription fees (owners earn 90% of all fees paid) and a 5% share of donations made to individual posts there. In a future update will be paywalls that can be applied to specific posts, with community owners receiving 5% of that income as well.

There are three exposure levels for communities: Public (anyone can view and post), Restricted (anyone can view, but only members may post), and Private (only members may view or post). Owners can manually approve new members for free, or have paying members approved automatically. This cuts down on spammers and trolls, who are less likely to join a group if there’s a payment requirement. Owners can also set their preferred subscription fee and period.

“As a proof-of-concept, we secured b/bitcoin and made it a paywalled community. BSV-haters can view the posts but can’t submit new ones without paying the community fee with BSV! How cool is that!” the devs added.

Other new features include a one-cent tipping option and NFT features with RelayX wallet integration. Four NFT collections can be used for profile avatars: Meta Turtle Verse, Puggo Sapiens Reserve, Based Babes, and Tester Penguins.

Speaking to CoinGeek, the development team said everything has gone as expected since the initial launch and that its user base had met the team’s expectations in terms of quality—though they’d like to see it expand.

“The BSV community is small when compared to other ‘crypto’ communities, but it doesn’t matter that much. Being supported by a smart and dedicated community is very important to a startup like ours and we are here to grow it more.”

Although Boardz isn’t aimed specifically at the still relatively-small BSV user world, it would be impossible for it to exist on any other blockchain. BSV’s ability to scale to process enormous volumes of data at an affordable price, including micropayments, is what makes it work. Users will still need to be a nominal “BSV user” to enjoy the benefits since its economy runs on small BSV payments. However, this is secondary to Boardz’s utility, and new users will soon see how useful the BSV network really is.

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