BitBounce – Email paywall that lets you get paid to receive marketing emails
bitbounce.com
bitbounce.com
What value is there in my newsletter or advertisement reaching you if it’s not appealing enough that you would want to receive it anyhow? And if you wanted to receive it, then that probably means it wouldn’t have been blocked by the spam filter.
In fact, all modern spam filters work on the premise that email has value if the end user interacts with it materially. Spam and low grade marketing receives very little interaction; this is why it is rejected.
The BitBounce guys are burning crypto hype. When that runs out, they will join the pile.
I have a marketing list, and every subscriber that has activated this service is now removed from the list. it's not worth it.
For example when Coca Cola have their brand on football matches, do you really think people are going to want to buy Coca Cola just because they saw the brand name?
Which means some companies might be interested in sending ads via BitBounce.
Why would anyone comply with this system and pay for their messages to be delivered? So long as nobody is using it (which is the current state of affairs), users of this system will see all their email, legitimate or not, ending up in the "unpaid" box, and nothing is accomplished.
I'm reminded of the famous old "Your post advocates a ____ solution to fighting spam" form-letter. This proposal checks quite a few of its boxes.
The main problem, as I see it, is that a sender can send to any number of recipients as many messages as they can. It's a one-to-many push model from sender to recipients. Filtering out all the trash is done on the receiver side.
This model obviously does not work. SMTP is unfixable, something new should be made.
What about making sure the sender is serious and putting the receiver in the loop of accepting the sender? This way the receiver controls what it wants to receive. If it's spam, don't receive it. Furthermore, bad senders should be penalized, so there's a form of "trust" involved as well. Also, spam-friendly ISPs and spamming botnets would become useless.
TL;DR: recipient-controlled proof-of-work puzzle given to sender.
I'm thinking of a flow, which would be something like this (just a sketch to describe the idea):
1. Sender announces intent-to-send "this is my cryptographically good identity, I want to send a message of x bytes with hash y. Please send me the proof-of-work."
2. Receiver checks if the identity is in a whitelist (trusted sender); if so, send a trivial puzzle. If not, send a default hard puzzle, 5 minutes to solve or whatever.
3. Proof-of-work sent and solved by sender, solution sent to receiver.
4. Receiver verifies proof-of-work and sends one-time token to sender.
5. Sender sends one-time token and the message.
6. Verify valid token, drop everything if invalid.
7. A human may classify the message as junk, at which point further mails from the same sender get penalized with higher puzzle strenghts.
The token is used to avoid sending messages at all if the sender is scammy (to avoid potentially large messages as part of the handshake).
If the sender was legit and the message was not some unwanted marketing drivel, the recipient can whitelist the sender, letting it avoid the puzzle on later messages.
Given this, over time the situation would "stabilize" in that folks who mail each other regularily could do so with ease, and spammers would have to solve evermore complex puzzles to get their message through. It would raise the price of spamming.
Also, for new contacts, it would still work just fine: either take the default puzzle solving time penalty, or pre-emptively whitelist the sender offline (type in id).
The idea is that the cost of sending has to go skyhigh for messages which abuse the system, and valid messages should stay zero-price. Otherwise, if everyone is equal when it comes to sending messages, I'm afraid the spam problem cannot go away.
There probably are bugs in the above description, so please be gentle; my point is the SMTP model (and by extension SMTP itself) is unfixable and something new should take its place. Something more robust and more suitable to resist "byzantine faulting users" and other malicious actors.
Edit: list, typo
One difference is a more interactive proof-of-work procedure where the receiver controls the amount of sender work required; with a zero amount of work (for trusted senders such as mailing lists and known people), the communication would basically behave like e-mail does today.
Something like HashCash seems to me like a good idea in general. I don't know why it didn't really take off.
The ol' "form letter" [1] still makes me laugh every time I see it.
I can’t be the only one doing that.
Back when there were “get paid to view ads” toolbars, they wee full of intrusive code that would ensure that you are looking at the ads and not just leaving your computer running unattended. I don’t think this will fly for email, so fraud would be rampant
This seems like an almost trivial service to implement yourself that could use bitcoin, or PayPal.
Plus it suffers from the traditional failure of challenge response spam blocking, in that it creates backscatter from spammers falsifying their "from" address.
Execution matters and it looks like the company is shutting down or close to it.
The ceo's twitter feed is, umm, interesting. Looks like he recently fled the US to the UK because running a business in the US was too hard and one can only assume the sec is on their heels. He also tweets about going through divorce with his co-founder and making layoffs.
According to Alexa, their website traffic has dropped from top 11k to 49k site in the last 90 days alone (that's all Alexa rankings show).
Someone mentioned it being an ICO, their ICO funds (yay for blockchain wallets being public) are basically empty after raising $12million two years ago.
You have to use their Credo cryptocurrency to get your email through / you receive Credo when someone pays. Which no one has and no one should have. They probably take a fee on every payment.
Once you get Credo you probably want to exchange it for USD or another crypto that is more broadly used and accepted at other merchants. How do you do that? Through their exchange which they take a .25% fee to buy sell.
So they double dip on a micropayment of a few cents.
I wonder which part of this enterprise will survive in the long run...the email service or the exchange or neither once the ICO money runs out
> The software will automatically ask those outside of your contact list to pay your inbox fee to send you emails.
I don’t like the product, although I like non-crypto parts of the concept. I might like a self-contained version of it that worked on whitelists and email filtering rules.
Many streamers set up a system where you can pay for your message to be guaranteed read by them or even published on screen for everyone.
That's without even considering how fundamental the flaws are in paying people to receive marketing
This typo is in the first paragraph on your website. The very first paragraph.
Things like this have existed forever and you don’t your own custom cryptocurrency to facilitate it.
A typo there.
*Outside of the personal relationship
"Set a price for your attention - Set a paywall price that businesses need to pay to send you marketing emails. "