The BitTubers.com beta is here!

It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. The BitTubers.com closed beta is live!

We’re excited today. For months we’ve been teasing our new platform. It’s yet another game-changer for us. We have solved the limitation of the old platform on a technical level and on a practical level. BitTubers.com is more accessible and discoverable. Everyone can share and promote their content as if they were on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and Twitch combined.

We will be in closed beta for the next 4 weeks. Stakers of the ‘Addict’ variety (25k TUBEs) will be the first to get early access. After two weeks, we will open the doors for 2500 TUBE stakers and after another two weeks we’ll go public. This approach gets us as much feedback as possible from invested early adopters without being overrun.

Well, what are you waiting for? Visit BitTubers.com now and learn how to upgrade your account now!

Features

Still here, huh? Alright then. Let us elaborate.

We wanted to make it easy to find and share content and to connect users with each other. We’ve combined familiar elements from platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and YouTube. You can live stream and upload videos, images, audio clips, or just make normal posts. Writing long-form articles will become available as well. You can manage subscriptions just like YouTube, the presentation feels a bit like Twitter. You can manage groups and send each other direct messages like Facebook. We’ve introduced “Topics” to follow hashtags a bit like subreddits, and we added up/downvotes and sorting filters to top it off.

One thing to note is that currently, playback quality is available only in the source’s native resolution. You can upload all the way up to 4K60 if you’d like, but some viewers might have trouble playing that back on their machine. This brings us to the subject of the memberships we offer, which you can read more about here. Our memberships unlock upload privileges and we are looking into offering multi-bitrate playback for members as well.

We will be adding a lot of features in the coming weeks and months. To name a few: live chat features to groups and Topics, post promotion, custom themes, multi-channel networks, analytics, distributed community moderation, event calendars for live streams and ‘premiers’ and more. Remember, if you have good ideas yourself, we would love to hear them!

The unique selling point

The biggest selling point of the platform isn’t its feature set, though. At the end of the day, anyone can build a feature-rich platform with enough time and money. No, the unique selling point stems from everything that we are building around it. Don’t forget that BitTube ultimately about monetization. So what’s so special about BitTubers.com? It enables any creator from any platform to share their content and to monetize it. Just link your account in the extension and ask your viewers to do the same. That is the power of AirTime, and that is part of the masterplan that will make BitTube succeed on a fundamental level.

BitTubers.com is also the first to use our AirTime 3.0 module. The AirTime module is a necessary component to monetize watch time from guests who do not have the extension. This latest iteration of our AirTime module enables native paywall functionality, TUBE purchases and donation all without the help of the extension. Several parties have lined up to start using this module and you will be hearing a lot more about this subject in the near future.

To dive deeper, check out the About page to learn all about features, the moderation aspect, memberships and our vision as a company.

What will happen to bit.tube?

You are of course wondering what bit.tube’s fate will be. In one of the upcoming extension releases, you will be able to link your legacy bit.tube account. We can then verify your content and migrate it to BitTubers.com. Rewards and new uploads on bit.tube will be disabled. We will actively inform users about the new platform. Three months after open beta, we expect all legacy users to have migrated and we will then shut down bit.tube for good.

Timing is everything

BitTubers.com has come at a time of much social and political turmoil. Tech giants including YouTube have been brazenly censoring and demonetizing creators during the past few years and it is now affecting everyone. We want to offer BitTubers and AirTime to creators across all platforms. The message is clear: together we are strong and together we can beat the trend of ‘advertiser friendly’ censorship set by omnipotent moral busybodies in Silicon Valley.

Be the change you want to see. Don’t delay, get early access today!

Credit card purchases and KYC

In other news, purchasing TUBEs with a credit card will be possible again soon. The community has been asking about this for several weeks. This service had been temporarily suspended while we were improving KYC/AML procedures. We must comply with European AML requirements to allow the buying and selling of TUBEs via credit/debit services. We will introduce the concept of “Verified TUBEs”, coins of which the origin can be proven. Since TUBE is a privacy coin, this concept will prevent you from sending coins to your debit card balance that originated outside of the ecosystem (e.g. an exchange or anonymous user). Remember, this is just related to credit/debit services.

Chrome Web Store shenanigans

Google recently removed the extension from the Chrome Web Store without cause. It followed an update that they rejected due to code from the ad blocker we are using. There was no reason for Google to take down the extension’s store page, as it had been fine for all this time. But they did. After making the proper adjustments, we are still waiting to be reinstated.

Knowing Google, we are not getting our hopes up. In the meantime, we have set up a tutorial page with instructions to install the extension manually here.

It‘s not all bad. The sudden removal of the extension prompted us to prepare for more independence.

Total independence.

The BitTube Browser

Another browser? Yes. It is the only solution — let us explain. We have been working on our own BitTube Browser based on Firefox. The browser will have the extension integrated natively. We now have a solid base for all of our future desktop and mobile apps. We will be able to offer an all-in-one BitTube package with always-on AirTime, wallet support and native BitTubers.com integration, which is great! In the end, it will be a better experience than a standalone extension and separate apps for everything.

But there is more. We are including onion routing (tor) into the BitTube Browser. Our goal is to offer BitTubers as a truly decentralized social network — not just a website — by integrating the front end into the browser like an app, combined with peer-to-peer solutions without any reliance on centralized content delivery networks (CDNs). This way, BitTubers.com cannot be taken down and we implore others to try the same.

Wrapping things up

We ask every beta tester to report issues and suggestions to hello@bittubers.com and/or the #bugreport topic on the platform itself.

We hope this update has covered most of the questions you might have had. Have an awesome weekend, BitTubers!

Your BitTube Team