KinkBNB Summer Update
Our first three months back were an interesting roller coaster. The current number of people working full-time on KinkBNB is exactly two, and we’ve added some other folks to help out as well. We are still looking to expand this number though, and to ensure that the people we bring on board bring as much to this venture as a community as they do as a business.
In the past three months, we’ve had a lot of positive and negative feedback on the direction we are going in. The positive feedback keeps us going. The negative feedback comes in two different categories:
1) “You are driving a lot of people away with the crypto scam garbage.”
To be fair, I expected a lot more of this. The truth of the matter is that we are onboarding enough people to not care about the number of people who are turned off by the move to crypto wallet-based verifications and payments. But really the best explanation is tied into the answer for #2 below.
2) “You only have 7 listings! I want my money back!”
We’ve made a very conscious decision not to issue refunds in this iteration of KinkBNB. As someone who has managed online processing systems for over 20 years, I can say with certainty that our credit card processing was severely affected by people who signed up for our service, used it once, and then did a chargeback on their credit card to say we stole money. This is not possible with cryptocurrency — and we’re not doing a rug pull here. You either support us and our mission to be a directory of kinky hosts, or you don’t buy into what we’ve set up. We made it very clear through our writings here, and FAQs on the site, that we are rebuilding the entire directory of hosts back from scratch. We DO have a list of over 600 former hosts, but that data was stale when the pandemic happened. If you couldn’t be bothered to read that and you are complaining because you spent $25 once on a site that you will have access to forever, then I don’t know what to tell you. No refunds.
You aren’t completely out of luck though — if you know anyone interested in a KinkBNB membership, you can either sell your tokens to them or you can just give them to someone who will use them. Someone could also set up a decentralized exchange for our tokens, and I might add one to the website if more than two people ask about it. The instructions for setting one up are available if you click on this sentence.
A lot of the positive feedback has also included queries about our KINK Token. We use this token for fundraising and it drives everything we build, so the easiest way to support us is to BUY THE TOKEN. We currently allow anyone to view our listings if they hold 25 KINK Tokens. Coming soon are levels of support, so if you hold 100 KINK tokens you’ll see different menu items. We’re dealing with potential investors in the same way. Holders of sufficient tokens will be able to see menus only meant for our investors, for example. We’ve gotten so many queries from investors that we had to set up a system like that to help manage it all. You can email us if you are interested in participating in this level.
We continue to have our usual luck with developers, meaning that we have to have everything technical documented completely and very well as we go. Over the next six months, we expect to do the following:
1) Improve the user experience on the listing pages.
2) Add passport scanning and basic profile checking to the web app.
3) Add investor menu
4) Add 50 and 100 KINK token levels
5) Add wallet-to-wallet messaging
6) Improve host badge code to include availability data
7) Open source a library for our decentralized location-based classified ad and identity verification tools
Yes, we developed some tools to help us build this system so we are getting them cleaned up and released into the wild. This could be the basis for decentralized versions of Airbnb, Craigslist, or any other platform that people want to advertise on. It’s not without its perils — I mean, Craig is the only guy I know with a serial killer “kind of” named after him. All the more reason to work on decentralized reputation and identity networks.
There are a lot of technologies I’m interested in evolving our system to use as well. One of the biggest is the Veilid Framework, from my former colleagues at the Cult of the Dead Cow. We currently use a private IPFS system to host our images for our Host Badges. Since Veilid was unveiled at Defcon, it became a worldwide IPFS+Tor network. Implementing it will help our security and redundancy. We also are looking at established sidechains to host our blockchain data such as Host Badges and future messaging systems. This is solely to save money.
As you might imagine, this is a lot to coordinate!
If you’ve read this far, I thank you. Check back quarterly for an update like this, in the meantime keep checking the site because we’re working through the backlog of host spaces! Thank you for joining us!
