what's the advantage of this over existing systems?

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.

Losing funds on lightning network can be "advantage"? https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/91211/how-can-so...

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.

> The possibility of losing funds exists, but bugs are something you would expect with any in-development technology.

Bugs exist, sure... but bugs that have the potential to cause direct revenue loss, and that cause the core purpose of the product to fail? That isn't a bug, that is a deal-killer.

How do you prevent users from selling illegal content? Do you really want to be anywhere near that?

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.

This will be an issue for anyone who hosts it. Is there a plan for your users?

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.

My mistake - I thought this was a “filebin”

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.

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

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.

I think this is actually the case.