Facebook wants to get rid of the up-vote button. And what does it actually mean, other than a virtual pat on the head? As virtual pats on the head come, I’d prefer a more tangible one.
So what if we can? What if we can have a button on Facebook, approved or not by Marky-mark, where you could show your love in a more tangible manner? Enter the “caress” button, a variant of the all familiar upvote, digg or +1 that could be introduced as a plugin on Facebook, or script mostly anywhere else. Pressing the button does one simple thing –
… It bestows a minuscule nano-donation on a poignant post or article in the form of a bitcoin transaction.
Think about it. Hundreds of millions of people a day express a (in measure of degree) sincere desire to show their appreciation for some stranger’s (or not so stranger’s) opinion. What if that opinion would be worth a nano-transaction in terms of explicit affirmation. One bitcoin is today worth just over 12$. In essence that would make a hundredth bitcoin be worth 12 cents.
I can envision a fairly safe programmable plugin that queues a sequence of nano-donations in this manner. The install would run a de fact bitcoin client for this purpose only. If the user (the person who up-votes and thus donates) has money in her or his account, the up-vote (“caress”) button turns visible. When you can;’ make donations, the button is grey. When you can, the button pops up. This button would be account-linked. Hovering over the button shows a number how many up-votes you can make. Each click has a small several second delay; each click adds a donation.
The button should have a function to confer any up-vote money to your “actual” bitcoin amount. In effect every up-vote button should have its own unique payment code for receipts and another for each PC on which it would be running. It might have a pop-op menu screen with some options. I can think of a few options 🙂
Sure this can be hacked. But imagine how many people would be made intimately familiar with Bitcoin if this mechanism became available to anyone? Its use might catch on really fast… 🙂