It works much like most social news sites where visitors can vote up stories they like to the home page in various different categories. The difference is that the voting is in bitcoins in increments of 0.001 units. 80% of the bitcoins received go to the poster of the article.
Posting and voting up articles is an anonymous process, and no login is needed (also IP addresses & sessions are not recorded). For those that are into Tor, onion links are welcome and are marked with an onion icon. Hopefully this will help with the discovery of content on the onion network.
Hard to think what it would be like if it got traction, though; you don't have a reliable way of telling if a single user has voted multiple times - so anyone with enough bitcoins could buy the front page, right?
To keep advertisements/spam away, users would have to be willing to outspend spammers - is that really going to work? Surely, at that point, its just an advertising space, like a billboard, rather than a news site?
Another point is that, as posters get 80% of the bitcoins spent on their post, the poster (lets say they are a spammer) has more than a 5 to 1 natural advantage over legit users - because they get 80% of what they spend upvoting themselves.
Its interesting, but have you thought about these issues?
The current calculation is bitcoins/sqrt(time)
The spammer is still just a single person, and if no one is sending coins to lets say his "viagra" post, then even if he has an advantage, it only takes a few people to like something else to outgun him. How many people vote up something on the home page of reddit. If they all put in for that, it would be very uneconomical to compete with.
Keep in mind, I don't really have a huge amount of faith that the system will work out. It is an experiment in micro-transactions and psychology.
Time will be the best judge.
EDIT: Also, I dislike the design. It's not very pretty. I'm not much of a designer myself, else I'd try to help you with it.
I don't see how it is just a feature. It is fundamentally different regarding what makes up a vote, and how things get popular.
http://www.markdotto.com/2012/01/24/bootstrap-2-ready-for-te...
Here's another bitcoin site made with bootstrap, fwiw:
Could you somehow allow for sharing revenue with content creators (where possible)? That way, people might be more incentivized to vote, since it would also be a donation to the creator.
Maybe you allow the submitter to specify the artist's email address, to which coins are sent. It would be an honor system, for sure, but it seems better than nothing.
Edit: in case it's unclear, I know that bitcoins can't be sent to an email address directly, but a link to a wallet can.
Let's say I post a link to Coding Horror. The system accumulates bitcoins as people upvote it, and then Jeff Atwood wants to claim them. He would simply register and a small piece of HTML with an unique value would be generated, which he would copy to that blog post.
The system can now verify the post is his and charge his address.
It's somewhat complicated (although not difficult to actually do), but on the other hand, we're talking about Bitcoin users ;)
I was thinking that if the submitter knows who the creator is, they can include that person's email address (which is usually not too hard to find).
Why don't I just make a submission where the first people to upvote my story gets more of the profits while I collect a 10% service fee?
This means that a vote up is very affordable, and it doesn't require attaining reputation on a site to push something you feel is worth while to the top of the stack.
There will be definitely be many freeloaders though, if the site's successful.
I'd definitely participate if I could see some traction or be allowed to create a "community" on something concrete I'm interested about. I think tags+categories are the way to go.
It isn't a meaningful site until something awful hacks it.
Either way, it is fixed now and you can continue to post.
witcoin.com seems to be down, so probably right time. good luck! :)
