Captain Bitcoin — Handling Spam
November Update and Major Changes
Since launching on 22 May 2020, Captain Bitcoin now boasts more than 170,000 users from 180+ countries and we could not have achieved this without constant feedback and ongoing support from our community.
Many who constantly engage with us know and understand we are a small team with a passion for driving Bitcoin, blockchain, and crypto adoption globally.
While we are still true to our mission, as the business grows and evolves, it encounters different challenges and the business has to make decisions with its and its communities best interest at heart.
With this in mind and after having had a conversation with members of our community and investors, we have decided we will be introducing a small one-off fee on the platform before the accounts can withdraw the tokens.
The purpose of adding the fee is simple — reduce SPAM and deter BAD-ACTORS
We will assume everyone is familiar with what spam is and understand the damage it can do.
Spam is an asymmetric challenge. If a bad actor can easily and cheaply create accounts to game the system and earn as many CAPT tokens as possible daily and increase their chances of winning Bitcoin, they will.
While the spammers’ effort is easy, cheap, and fast, spam resistance is very difficult.
Something that was even highlighted by Vitalik recently.
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1303140765275623424?s=20
As a company, we have continued to evolve and add layers of security to help reduce spam, and while we have been able to tackle the majority of the bots, we have struggled to deter bad actors on the platform.
The purpose of adding this fee is to make it expensive for bad actors to spam Captain Bitcoin and make the distribution of CAPT tokens fairer for the users using the platform fairly.
Note — third bullet point in Vitalik’s second tweet, as the first two do not apply to us.
As you are aware, users can, in theory, currently create an infinite number of Captain Bitcoin accounts with different ETH addresses and watch videos from each of these platforms daily and also refer as many accounts as possible and earn significant number of the CAPT tokens.
We have already built complex systems and implemented them, which continues to flag them and we delete them as we go, but the effort from the user’s side is still relatively easy.
We have already deleted hundreds, if not thousands of accounts of these bad actors, but we know hundreds still slip through.
Even the worlds largest companies with near infinite resources and funding like Facebook and Twitter have this problem.
For us, we think adding a one-time fee to the platform will help us filter these users.
Additionally, we will be changing the referral system from the current system to a system where the user counts as an active referral as long as the individual they have referred has paid this fee!
The fee for now is set to 0.008 ETH.
Users will be able to continue using the platform as they can and continue to watch and earn and refer and earn, but they will not be able to withdraw their tokens or Bitcoin from the platform until they have paid this one-time fee.
Why can’t the users pay the fee in CAPT token?!?
Because this will not deter bad actors and spammers. Example below -
If the user creates 10 accounts and earns 100 CAPT on each account, they would have earned a total of 1000 CAPT.
If we charge the user 20 CAPT in fees per account to withdraw these tokens, they would have profited for 800 CAPT and will continue to do this, making it unfair for other community members and platform users.
Adding a one-time fee per account helps us deter that by making it expensive for bad actors to create spam accounts, hopefully deterring them.
This in return should increase rewards for users using the platform fairly.
How will the one-time fee of 0.008 ETH be used?
As below -
- 50% of the fees will be used to market buyback CAPT and provide liquidity (creating frequent buy pressure on the token) which will be locked (burned)
The remaining 50% will be used for -
- Continued development of the platform
- What the team and community may see fit to drive the platform forward governed by the DAO
Additionally, this also increases the utility of the token, as it indirectly acts as users paying CAPT to use the platform (50% fee used to buy and burn CAPT) and they are all burned. 0.004 ETH worth of CAPT per user.
Another solution would have been to implement KYC for each user and this was simply not a feasible solution due to the nature of our product.
Finally, the un-staking function is also live.
Best
- The Captain
