Just got a chance to try out the Kim Dotcom CashRain beta.
A couple of screenshots I quickly took of the site: https://imgur.com/a/TgeBfs0
My thoughts:
Kim made some big promises last year and earlier this year, after getting excited about BCH and making several public statements about it, but then failed to deliver either his planned FileSharing site (K.im) or the viral social media site (CashRain).
Both seemed to be vapourware. The community felt let down, but we've seen it before so for the most part expectations had already been tempered by a sense of “I'll believe it when I see it”. This proved wise, as it seemed increasingly likely that these products were vapourware that were never going to see the light of day. Announcements and hype on Kim's part trailed off into nothing.
Fast forward six months to today (November 4 2022), and suddenly Kim announces a surprise Twitter space and private beta for CashRain. Maybe that's just software dev, things always take longer than expected.
So what is CashRain and how does it work?
Essentially the site is like a “reverse donation” or “mass airdrop” or “mass chaintip” tool. To start with, you sign in by scanning a Bitcoin.com wallet QR code (although in future it would be nice if more wallets were supported, aka the ability to just enter a generic BCH address). Then you pick a name, email and password like signing up for most websites. This puts you on a page where you can join communities or look at the leaderboard.
The demo only had 2 communities, the Kim Dotcom community and the CashRain community but presumably in future either a limited set of approved influencer people, or perhaps just any user, can create their own. Anyone in a community can “rain” (aka donate) BCH to the rest of the community. So let's say a big streamer can donate 10 BCH to all of their CashRain followers. But also, any member of the community can also donate to all of the others too, so it's kind of a big festival of donations / tipping. Sending donations is fun and ranks you up on the leaderboard (I guess it might help to build notoriety or status by being a charitable person) and receiving tips is fun of course because you're getting free money and you get little dopamine inducing notification pop ups on your screen (or by email, or in your BCH wallet), similar to how noise.cash works. This is a pretty genius strategy, because it also reminds me of how Bitcoin (and later Dogecoin) were going viral initially on Reddit back in 2014-2015, with people using the Reddit crypto tip bots (which later got banned from most subs for being unasked for and spammy). CashRain is like that, but only for people who opt into it, and across EVERY social media platform to large groups of followers. The payout from a donation is not uniform across the community, it is staggered so that 1 user gets a big payout (the “Jackpot”), a bunch get a smaller payout, a big pool get a microtip of a few cents, and if you're unlucky or the donation wasn't very big then you miss out on that rain but you can maybe get some in the next one. Individual users can increase their chance of getting rain by linking up to their various social media accounts, which then check to see that you follow the Community leader's page (so Kim in this case). In other words, this is a way for influencers to not only reward their fans and spread BCH, but also to indirectly pay for social media follows.
The other page in CashRain beta Leaderboard shows most “rained” communities or users, aka the communities which have received the most BCH or the users that have donated the most BCH.
The site was pragmatic, but actually very advanced for a beta product, and the UI looked clean and slick. Linking to a social media site like Twitch or Twitter was slick and worked flawlessly. This definitely doesn't play into the cypherpunk privacy centered ethos (there's no KYC, but it does essentially involve linking to your social media accounts, although those can be pseudonymous of course).
I didn't hit on any bugs when using the site. The incentives certainly seemed well aligned, I liked using the product, it was really fun even in its beta state just donating a few satoshis and briefly appearing on the leaderboard, and I can definitely DEFINITELY see this going mega viral with the Twitch under 25 crowd. All it takes is 1 influencer getting excited about it, and it can set off a mega chain reaction.
Kim said he expected an open beta to be ready in the next 30 days. With the rate of delivery on previous promises, that might be optimistic, but I can believe 30 days is realistic with how bug free and functional the site I saw today was.
I didn't catch the entire Twitter call, but I did get about the last 10 minutes or so. Kim was taking feedback from the listeners who were pointing out a few things that could be tweaked and improved, like adding Odysee to the list of supported social media sites (along with Twitter, Twitch, Youtube, Instagram). One listener asked about how the site is protected from bots, and the developer (I think?) of the site said that they would implement some kind of bot filtering or account checks to minimise that (my opinion: even a simple filter like only accounts of a certain age and with certain activity patterns could already cut out most bots, so this seems fairly manageable especially in an app that encourages linking to multiple social media platforms). Kim also talked about hoping to scale up to hundreds of millions of cash rain tips per day, and although this is a big ambition and only time will tell whether it comes true, the demo certainly felt like it had that potential.
Still no word on the filesharing app K.im, but 1 out of 2 ain't bad especially when CashRain seems so promising so I'll take it. And who knows maybe K.im also pops out in a useable state when its least expected.
Overall: 9/10 private beta experience, and I am very very excited for this launching for real. BCH has been crushing it on the technology / protocol front, but a lot less on the user adoption, virality, user interface and social media angles – and this can potentially do a TON of good in that area. Hopefully the open beta is out soon so more people can be involved!
St Kitts conference coming up and lock in for May 23 upgrade CHIPs as well, November looking like a good month for BCH.
I'm going to bed now but I will try answer if there are any questions in the comments tomorrow.