I'm amused that y'all's big idea for rescuing Hubski from the funding miasma of social networks is Micropayments - the Great White Hope of People Who Don't Understand Economics.

I'm further amused that you decided to hide the mechanics under a layer of abstraction by leveraging the most volatile trading token you could find.

Finally, the fact that you've given it to 20 users, none of whom have any real idea what's going on or why, as a measure of a site-wide result kinda tickles me pink.

This is a bad idea. You're adding friction to the one aspect of the site you want to be frictionless (Hubski: the discouraging web). For the people whom you have incentivized to Share The Love (STL), you've given no guidance as to expected measures, what the economics actually mean for the site or what everyone else is doing. For the people whom are just watching the experiment you're simply letting them know that you added a weird useless marker to 20 Secret Shoppers.

I suspect the end result will be "mk learns why micropayments are a bad idea" which, if this is what it takes, is entirely worth the trouble.

HOWEVER if this means that you're going to play games with profit models, I'm all for it... assuming we can try some different games. I have a few ideas. Shall I list them elsewhere, since this discussion is already unwieldy?

EDIT two hours after writing this, and with very little else in my feed at the moment, I've determined that I've donated 250 bits and earned 17.3 bits. In other words, this comment has earned me about half a cent in play money. Which, as boldboldness points out, is fucking insulting. Chapter 4.