Lightning hosted is a new image-sharing website that shares ad revenue (paid in satoshis) with its image uploaders via Bitcoin Lightning Network.
Lightning Hosted, Lightning Paid
Getting started with Lightning hosted is simple: upload a popular image you think will gain traffic and receive the ad revenue for it later. Some popular choices on the network so far include memes, public domain photography, and images of funny or popular tweets and Facebook posts.
There are, however, limits to what you can and cannot upload. For example, copyrighted photos, pornography, violence etc. are all banned.
Taken from the founder’s own words:
As a rule of thumb if it wouldn’t be acceptable on a California beach it’s not acceptable here.
Pay in Bitcoin Lightning
Before you can upload an image, you’ll be asked to pay a small fee to cover the site’s costs and to prevent abuse of the service. Payment can only be made in Bitcoin Lightning.
After you upload your desired image, you’ll then be presented with a QR code and corresponding lightning address to make the deposit.
After you’ve paid your fee, you’ll then receive a unique URL with your image link that contains advertisements.
Satoshis will start to accumulate in your account and can be withdrawn at any time. But as the website is in beta, the founder claims that the Satoshi amount will not always be accurate. Also, withdrawals will be delayed until the platform is paid by its advertisers.
But Don’t Be Too #Reckless
You can easily start sending and receiving by using one of the currently available mobile wallets that support Lightning. Though we do not recommend to yet store a significant amount of funds on custodial wallets, in particular.
This is because Lightning Network is still bleeding edge technology and using it can be quite #reckless.
The Lightning Hosted service is currently in beta so the service will undoubtedly have a few bugs. In fact, the operator claims that the site is not to be trusted, stating:
both the Lightning Network and especially this service are in beta and mistakes are bound to happen. Please withdraw often and do not trust this service with any amount of money you would be upset to lose.
Bitcoin’s second-layer Lightning Network has grown tremendously over the past year, currently standing at over 8 thousand nodes and $5 million in capacity.
As previously reported, there are many more Lightning apps (Lapps) being launched to take advantage of instant and near-zero cost online payments.
You can check out some of the cool Lapps featured by Bitcoinist here.
Will you be using Lightning Hosted for images? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via Shutterstock, Lightning Hosted