[HN Gopher] Show HN: Agora: Sell Files on the Web
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Show HN: Agora: Sell Files on the Web
Author : rodarmor
Score : 61 points
Date : 2021-08-06 20:16 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (agora.download)
(TXT) w3m dump (agora.download)
| sdan wrote:
| So like Gumroad but with crypto payments?
| rodarmor wrote:
| Very much so! Plus it's open source and anyone can run an
| instance.
| [deleted]
| altilunium wrote:
| Yes. Bitcoin, specifically.
| akomtu wrote:
| This brazen simplicity is what makes it look like the next
| Dropbox.
| altilunium wrote:
| "Received Payment
|
| A welcome gift! Thanks for trying HTLC.me!
|
| 0.00313370 tBTC ($140.06 tUSD)"
|
| What is the difference between USD and tUSD?
| rodarmor wrote:
| HTLC.me is a testnet Lightning wallet, so the balances are in
| tBTC, testnet bitcoin. tUSD isn't a real thing, it just means
| that if your balance was in BTC and not tBTC, you would have
| that much USD.
| altilunium wrote:
| Let's say i want to test it by using real BTC. How can i do
| it? The real lightning wallet.
| rodarmor wrote:
| The most convenient Lightning Wallet is probably Wallet of
| Satoshi, which you can find on the Apple or Android app
| stores. Once you download it, you can fund it with an on-
| chain transaction. Once you have funds in the wallet, you
| should be able to pay for invoices at agora.download.
| altilunium wrote:
| Have you tested it by using real BTC?
|
| I just read from lnd's documentation (here : https://gith
| ub.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/master/docs/saf...) that
| "As of this writing , lnd is still in beta and it is
| considered #reckless to put any life altering amounts of
| BTC into the network.
|
| Are you sure that agora is really safe?
| rodarmor wrote:
| We have tested it using real BTC, so far so good! LND is
| definitely still in beta, and the Lightning Network
| itself is still in its infancy, so it's a good idea not
| to have too much funds in an LND wallet.
|
| We're try to be very careful when developing Agora, and
| all features are covered by unit and integration tests.
| However, bugs are always a possibility.
| altilunium wrote:
| Also, when we want to self-host our own Agora instance.
| Should we run our own LND instance, or can we just
| connect it to any pre-existing LND instance? Do you have
| any recommendation, which LND instance that is "good" and
| "trusted"?
| rodarmor wrote:
| If you connected an Agora instance to an LND instance,
| you would have to trust the person who ran that instance,
| since they would be in control of funds from payments, so
| I think the best idea is to run your own LND instance.
| altilunium wrote:
| I think i should learn more about LND first. I've
| downloaded the LND's docker image. Then i tried to run
| the example commands, but it still dont work.
|
| "Unable to find image 'myrepository/lnd:latest' locally
| docker: Error response from daemon: pull access denied
| for myrepository/lnd, repository does not exist or may
| require 'docker login': denied: requested access to the
| resource is denied."
|
| I'm also pretty new to Docker though. So maybe i should
| learn about Docker first before learning about LND.
|
| Can you tell us how to run our own LND instance and how
| to connect it to Agora? I think, a step-by-step tutorial
| would be a great help to us as an Agora user who want to
| self-host it.
| rodarmor wrote:
| It's definitely challenging to set up an LND instance.
| I'll try to find a good one and link to it from our
| readme!
| kevkevinpal wrote:
| If you're trying to set up an lnd instance take a look at
| raspiblitz it bootstraps the process for you and can be
| attached to a raspberry pi 4
| altilunium wrote:
| So,if we want to use Wallet of Satoshi as a preferred
| lightning wallet for our Agora instance, we should
| connect our Agora instance to Wallet of Satoshi's LND
| gRPC server.
|
| Where i can find Wallet of Satoshi's LND gRPC server host
| and port?
| rodarmor wrote:
| Ahh, not quite. I thought you were asking about a wallet
| for making payments, i.e. for buying content from Agora.
|
| In order to process payments for your Agora instance, you
| would need to connect it to an LND instance that you ran
| yourself.
| forgingahead wrote:
| Fantastic effort - great to see decentralised file downloads with
| the ability to accept payments. It's a good step towards freeing
| independent commerce from the increasingly-censorious
| establishment tech players.
|
| There is certainly potential for negatives, like people self-
| hosting to sell pirated and other illegal content. However we're
| at this point because the establishment services have been
| engaging in worsening behaviour over the past few years.
|
| Good luck and looking forward to seeing this develop.
| rodarmor wrote:
| Thank you for the kind words!
| jareklupinski wrote:
| finally, an implementation for error 402: Payment Required !
| akomtu wrote:
| That's potentially very big, but it needs some plumbing. Can you
| use a Visa card to refill a "lightning network account" or
| whatever you call it? Can the seller get proceeds to a bank
| account in $s?
| rodarmor wrote:
| It's actually pretty easy to get into and out of Bitcoin.
| river.com, is a US-based service that allows buying and selling
| bitcoin with USD, making USD transfers to and from a linked
| bank account, and making and receiving Lightning Network
| payments.
|
| So you could set up an LND instance, get inbound liquidity with
| a service like Bitrefill*, and then withdraw any funds via the
| Lightning Network to a River account, sell the proceeds for
| USD, and transfer them to your bank account.
|
| I use River as an example because it's my favorite, but there
| are many other services that you could also use.
|
| * It's slightly subtle aspect of the Lightning Network, but in
| order to receive funds, you need inbound liquidity, i.e. a
| channel with your Lightning Network node with funds on your
| counterparty's side of the channel. This can be accomplished
| buy buying inbound liquidity from a service like Bitrefill:
| https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/lightning-channel/
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| For those of us who aren't totally up on crypto stuff,
| liquidity in this sense is basically buffering the money
| until the final Bitcoin transaction settles? So if you buy,
| say, 1,000,000 sats from Bitrefill, that means you can only
| have 1,000,000 sats worth of transactions "in the pipeline",
| so to speak?
|
| If so, what happens if you do have more than that amount in
| outstanding transactions? The transactions fail? They hang
| around and complete after the pipeline empties out?
|
| What if I just want to assume that the customer is good for
| the money and queue it up myself for settlement once I have
| the liquidity to spare. Does Agora let me do that?
|
| I apologize if these are dumb questions.
| altilunium wrote:
| "By default agora serves files for free. To charge for downloads,
| agora must be connected to an LND instance."
| https://github.com/agora-org/agora/
|
| "As of this writing, lnd is still in beta and it is considered
| #reckless to put any life altering amounts of BTC into the
| network."
|
| https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/master/docs/saf...
| rodarmor wrote:
| Agora is a simple web file server that charges for downloads. It
| uses the Lightning Network for payments. The Lightning Network is
| a layer on top of Bitcoin that enables fast payments with very
| low fees. It settles to the Bitcoin network, so there's no
| separate token or currency.
|
| Agora is released under a maximally permissive license and
| written in Rust. Currently it integrates with LND for Lightning
| Payments, so you'll need to also have an LND instance running if
| you want to charge for downloads.
|
| And if you're interested in using Agora to sell some files,
| please try it out and let us know what you think! We have lots of
| ideas for features that we'd like to add, but are much more
| interested in what users need.
| shiftingleft wrote:
| what's the advantage of this over existing systems?
| rodarmor wrote:
| There might be others, but the existing system that comes to
| mind is Gumroad, a service that allows creators to sell
| digital content.
|
| Compared to Gumroad, Agora is not subject to censorship and
| can be self-hosted.
| murple wrote:
| Losing funds on lightning network can be "advantage"?
| https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/91211/how-can-
| so...
| rodarmor wrote:
| The possibility of losing funds exists, but bugs are
| something you would expect with any in-development
| technology. And, existing payment services are not without
| risk. Getting your account frozen and funds taken is pretty
| common with PayPal, Square, and other payment providers,
| which is not possible with the Lightning Network.
| pharmakom wrote:
| How do you prevent users from selling illegal content? Do you
| really want to be anywhere near that?
| devops000 wrote:
| I think this is actually the case.
| rodarmor wrote:
| We don't host Agora instances, aside from our test instances,
| so we cannot prevent users from selling illegal content. Any
| useful technology has the potential for abuse, and Agora is
| no different.
| danmaz74 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, did you think about the use case for
| authorities to deal with people selling forbidden images?
| I'm sure you already know which kind I'm thinking of.
| caslon wrote:
| The vast majority of people looking for _that_ are
| just... regular people. Awful people, yes, but no smarter
| than your average bear.
|
| There are hundreds of thousands of _those_ images being
| transmitted fully-encrypted on WhatsApp, a fully-legal
| multi-billion dollar platform, _every year._ And that 's
| just what users self-report![1] Why would any crook
| bother with Agora when they're already using fully-
| encrypted platforms like WhatsApp? What would be their
| thought process in switching? It's not like Bitcoin is
| particularly difficult to track, anyway.
|
| Agora seems completely stupid and pointless, but let's
| not pretend that they're doing something disastrously
| morally harmful. More than likely, it's just a platform
| that will die out in a few months. Best-case scenario, it
| serves as a honeypot for people with Coinbase accounts
| that want to break the law. It's actually _easier_ to
| track than people transmitting these sorts of things over
| centralized, encrypted platforms.
|
| [1] A tweet by Will Cathcart, who's the corporate head of
| WhatsApp at Facebook.
| https://twitter.com/wcathcart/status/1423701475595755524
| danmaz74 wrote:
| My point is that that use case will very easily attract
| attention from authorities if it will make it easier to
| make money with those images.
| pharmakom wrote:
| This will be an issue for anyone who hosts it. Is there a
| plan for your users?
| rodarmor wrote:
| Can you explain why it will be an issue for anyone who
| hosts it? The host determines what content is available.
| Agora does not yet support user uploads.
| pharmakom wrote:
| My mistake - I thought this was a "filebin"
| aww_dang wrote:
| NANO payments might be an interesting addition to this project
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| This could be a self-hosted onlyfans if I understand correctly?
| rodarmor wrote:
| Definitely!
| altilunium wrote:
| Cool project. Let's say i want to switch the currency from BTC to
| BAT. How can i do that?
| rodarmor wrote:
| Currently, it only integrates with the Lightning Network via
| LND. You would have to modify it to support BAT. However, BAT
| would probably not be a good choice. BAT transactions are slow
| when compared to Lightning Network payments. Also, since BAT is
| a token on Ethereum, the fees would likely be prohibitive for
| small, or even medium size payments.
| altilunium wrote:
| Htlc.me message when i tried to buy your file : Send Payment
| Failed
|
| Payment failed to send. This can happen due to temporary network
| connectivity issues or an unexpected server error.
| rodarmor wrote:
| Thanks for trying it out! Is the failure persistent or does it
| work when you retry it?
| altilunium wrote:
| New error message : Payment Problem
|
| You already paid that invoice! Ask them for a new one?
|
| I still cant pass the paywall.
| rodarmor wrote:
| Are you using the agora.download or test.agora.download? If
| you're using test.agora.download, are you paying with
| htlc.me? Can you provide the invoice ID? (It's the
| hexadecimal string after `/invoice/`.)
| altilunium wrote:
| I'm using the agora.download. test.agora.download is
| working fine.
| rodarmor wrote:
| If you're using htlc.me, that's probably the issue.
| htlc.me is a testnet wallet, so it can only pay testnet
| invoices, and agora.download is on mainnet.
| altilunium wrote:
| I cant send the payment to agora.download, but i can send it to
| test.agora.download . What's happening?
| rodarmor wrote:
| Just saw this now, but agora.download is on mainnnet, and
| test.agora.download is on testnet, so if you're using a
| testnet wallet, it won't be able to pay the mainnet invoices
| from agora.download.
| altilunium wrote:
| Hello, i'm from Altilunium News. I just posted Agora's news
| coverage on Twitter here :
| https://twitter.com/altilunium/status/1424256255598600198?s=...
| rodarmor wrote:
| Nice, thank you!
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(page generated 2021-08-08 23:03 UTC)