How I became the top stacker of all-time on stacker.news
through hard work, stick-to-itiveness, and a heap o' gumption.
stacker.news is an online forum where users share stories, resources, and news about Bitcoin or topics related to Bitcoin. However, instead of upvoting or liking posts, users tip each others’ posts with Bitcoin. Users also pay to submit posts, which acts as a mechanism for limiting spam. The first few interactions with the website are free. Afterwards, users can deposit Bitcoin or earn it from others by providing valuable content during the ‘free trial’. All contributions are voluntary. Furthermore, active users receive an airdrop every day.
I’ve had some luck with posting my paper synopses there, with my top post having earned about 11k sats (~$2 at the time of writing). Regardless of amount, an opportunity to earn money pseudonymously online should not be overlooked!
WoT model
@k00b, the owner of stacker.news, consistently updates users with the latest development of the website. In one of these updates, he mentioned reworking the web-of-trust model, which is used to organize the posts on the front page. More info on WoT model.
Trust is mod-centric. @k00b trusts himself 100% and (in a way) distributes that trust to other users by ‘voting’ on their posts. Tipping is an act of voting. Users only ‘vote’ on a post once when they first tip it. One can still tip a post multiple times, but repeated tips on the same post do not increase trust. In this way, users who have received trust from @k00b can distribute it further by voting on other users’ posts.
The WoT explanation also mentions using this trust score in the daily airdrop to prefer ‘trusted’ users.
Top Users
Posts, comments and users can be ranked by the amount of Bitcoin they have stacked.
Here’s how I (@v1ntage) compare:
Over 1 million sats stacked!
To @quantity:
…
Okay, there’s a catch. @quantity is also my account.
I realized something obvious during my conversation with @k00b about the WoT model. Two (or more) accounts controlled by a single user can tip each others’ posts back and forth to make it look like they have earned more from their content than they actually have. Even a single sat has infinite potential in this regard.
While this is not double-spending in the truest definition, statistics such as sats stacked can be misinforming. Even modifying the stat to ‘net sats stacked’ won’t help, because the sats can still be cycled between two users via lightning invoices. ex. A tips B, B pays A, repeat.
So in the end, the statistic is meaningless. But it’s nice to be #1 :)
Technical corrections, comments, questions welcome!