Currently in Beta 1.0, Crypto Speech (launched in early August 2017) is a very basic version of Twitter for the Ethereum blockchain where users can post messages of up to 128 characters. All messages are stored on the Ethereum blockchain, unlike an ordinary website where data would be stored in a database on a server.
Why use Ethereum? With Ethereum, all messages (along with the user who submitted them and the time they were submitted) may be stored forever among the thousands of nodes in the blockchain, creating a record that cannot be deleted or censored. Even if the website at cryptospeech.com went down the messages would remain in the blockchain.
How to use Crypto Speech: Your browser will need to be configured to interact with the Ethereum blockchain, which is very easy with the MetaMask plugin for Google Chrome. That’s enough to view messages, but if you’d like to post your own message, you’ll need some “Ether” in your account, which is what’s used to pay Ethereum miners for processing transactions. Posting a message should cost around $1 or less at the current Ether price (used for paying miners only — none of that goes to us).
How it works: You can read about this in some detail at http://cryptospeech.com/how-it-works.html. There are in fact only 3 files that make up this app:
– A Solidity “smart contract”
– A simple HTML page
– A Javascript file that allows the webpage to interact with the smart contract
The smart contract has functions for setting and retrieving messages, which the Javascript file will execute when the user performs some action.
Try it out: Go to CryptoSpeech.com and try posting a message of your own.
Feedback/comments welcome
