7 ms·

BitBounce – Email paywall that lets you get paid to receive marketing emails

55 points by potench 7y ago

liamcardenas 7y ago
This has very little to do with email. They basically just pay you to view ads. Things like this have existed forever and you don’t your own custom cryptocurrency to facilitate it.
duskwuff 7y ago
I don't get it. 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. https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
- jnurmine 7y ago
  Spam works great because it's cheap to send and because the SMTP protocol and everything around it is rather simple to fool. Just think about mails with "From: admin@your-organization.com" or "Subject: lab grade 1,2,3,4,5-Pentahydroxypentane for ur er3kt1on" etc. 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. If a 5 minutes puzzle is not enough, make it longer, the point is, the receiver controls all this. 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
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    What you're describing here appears to be similar to HashCash (which was first proposed in 1997!), but with extra steps. It suffers from all the same problems which resulted in that scheme not being used.
    - jnurmine 7y ago
      Good point! Indeed HashCash is very similar. And probably where I actually got the main idea, as I'm absolutely certain I read about HashCash long ago. Seems that the idea was left to ferment in my head after all these years. 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.
RichardHeart 7y ago
I love never emailing anyone that signs up to my list with a bitbounce email. I'm not going to incentivize fake users signing up on mechanical turk to pollute my db.
- Justsignedup 7y ago
  From what I can tell, it'll be a gmail email. So at the end of the day you won't know.
- dangero 7y ago
  It’s ridiculous — we get bitbounce account signups to our newsletter constantly only to request payment from us when we send them the email they requested. It’s beyond idiotic
  - kevinyun 7y ago
    That sounds comedically frustrating!
Justsignedup 7y ago
I like this idea. I set my price to a dollar. If you care enough to pay me to see your ad, I'd watch it.
- eternalny1 7y ago
  You don't mind that EVERYONE who isn't on your contact list is going to be asked to pay you? > The software will automatically ask those outside of your contact list to pay your inbox fee to send you emails.
niksmac 7y ago
Isn't it the same thing that earn.com does? Plus you get a chance to read the entire email?
- oyebenny 7y ago
  Yup!
theamk 7y ago
So why would advertisers pay for this? Surely people will sign up for thousands of email accounts, subscribe them all to every mailing list, then collect free money? 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
smaddock 7y ago
I posted on a Google forum recently and got two BitBounce replies in an hour, presumably from users autosubscribed to new threads. I'm going to need to start blocking all replies with the BitBounce template.
Justsignedup 7y ago
Facebook, of course, has blocked the ability to post a link to this site.
nsx147 7y ago
Great idea! I really wanted to use this...but then I dug into how it worked. 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
- dangero 7y ago
  None of it because the idea does not work for a number of documented reasons. This is not the first time this has been tried.
- GnarfGnarf 7y ago
  Is ".25%" a quarter of one percent? Vg. 0.0025? That doesn't seem much. 2.5¢ on a $10. transaction.
dangero 7y ago
We have a service that gets slammed by bitbounce messages requesting us to pay and I make sure to mark every single one as spam which shows why this won’t work. I can’t be the only one doing that.
- benj111 7y ago
  Can't you just sign up to bitbounce, and bounce the demands back?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dangero 7y ago
    Good idea but I don’t want to support the service in any way.
    - benj111 7y ago
      The service doesn't really bring anything new though, all you really need is to autoreply asking for payment, if you want to go the extra mile you can set up some way for people to actually pay you, I don't think that part would actually be required though.
ttul 7y ago
I have been working in anti-spam since 2003. BitBounce will fail just like GoodMail and Habeas before them. Why? Because marketers won’t pay to reach your inbox when they know it won’t improve their conversion rate. And after all, the email’s purpose is to convert actual business; not just to reach your eyeballs. 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.
- techsin101 7y ago
  Solid insights on both sides of market
- aflag 7y ago
  If people know they can pay 10p so that the important email they have to send will certainly not end up in the spam folder I think it will benefit everyone. And if all marketing email is being filtered and they don't see value in paying to get it delivered, everyone wins.
  - Nursie 7y ago
    I don't want that world to exist.
- Hitton 7y ago
  This. Also this would be ripe for abuse, I can easily see nefarious actors setting up email accounts just to receive the paid emails and get money.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 7y ago
LeoPanthera 7y ago
I was actually quite excited until the "we use our own crytocurrency" part. 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.
jlgaddis 7y ago
Yet another Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (FUSSP) [0]. The ol' "form letter" [1] still makes me laugh every time I see it. [0]: https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html [1]: https://www.dmuth.org/fussp/ https://www.dmuth.org/fussp/
gingabriska 7y ago
It should be possible for the viewer to select a different dollar rate , everyone's time has a different value, so it makes sense to read only the emails who are willing to pay you for your time to acknowledge their offer. *Outside of the personal relationship
- eternalny1 7y ago
  Right on the site: "Set a price for your attention - Set a paywall price that businesses need to pay to send you marketing emails. "
  - gingabriska 7y ago
    Thanks I missed that one :)
easytiger 7y ago
Total scam. On what planet does letting a dubious company hijack your email service and demand money from anyone who sends you an email count as a reasonable product? Dubious excuse to create an ICO at the expense of exploiting people's greed - a greed that will never be rewarded. That's without even considering how fundamental the flaws are in paying people to receive marketing
nathanbarry 7y ago
This is such a dumb service. Emails just get unsubscribed or reported as spam.
akidomowri 7y ago
> businesses who what to reach you This typo is in the first paragraph on your website. The very first paragraph.
mkagenius 7y ago
> BitBounce ... who _what_ to reach you. A typo there.
thih9 7y ago
Offtopic, kudos for linking „featured at” banners to actual mentions. I wish more landing pages did that. 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.
jbverschoor 7y ago
Good luck getting critical emails or confirmation emails
cr555 7y ago
first sentence gotta typo? "BitBounce is an email paywall that blocks spam and lets you get paid to receive marketing emails from businesses who what to reach you."
ericbarnes 7y ago
I sometimes work on the tech support side and I love when people email in, I respond with the answer, only to have my email come back with BitBounce. The really great part is when they are all upset that they haven't received an answer.
Waterluvian 7y ago
This reminds me of how Twitch streamers filter viewer comments. 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.
cvsisapharmacy 7y ago
This idea has merit, advertisers pay for access to our lives every which way from Sunday - except for email. But this will not be the solution. 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.

55 points by potench 7y ago

This has very little to do with email. They basically just pay you to view ads. Things like this have existed forever and you don’t your own custom cryptocurrency to facilitate it.

duskwuff 7y ago

I don't get it. 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. https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

jnurmine 7y ago
Spam works great because it's cheap to send and because the SMTP protocol and everything around it is rather simple to fool. Just think about mails with "From: admin@your-organization.com" or "Subject: lab grade 1,2,3,4,5-Pentahydroxypentane for ur er3kt1on" etc. 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. If a 5 minutes puzzle is not enough, make it longer, the point is, the receiver controls all this. 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
- duskwuff 7y ago
  What you're describing here appears to be similar to HashCash (which was first proposed in 1997!), but with extra steps. It suffers from all the same problems which resulted in that scheme not being used.
  - jnurmine 7y ago
    Good point! Indeed HashCash is very similar. And probably where I actually got the main idea, as I'm absolutely certain I read about HashCash long ago. Seems that the idea was left to ferment in my head after all these years. 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.

RichardHeart 7y ago

I love never emailing anyone that signs up to my list with a bitbounce email. I'm not going to incentivize fake users signing up on mechanical turk to pollute my db.

Justsignedup 7y ago
From what I can tell, it'll be a gmail email. So at the end of the day you won't know.
dangero 7y ago
It’s ridiculous — we get bitbounce account signups to our newsletter constantly only to request payment from us when we send them the email they requested. It’s beyond idiotic
- kevinyun 7y ago
  That sounds comedically frustrating!

Justsignedup 7y ago

I like this idea. I set my price to a dollar. If you care enough to pay me to see your ad, I'd watch it.

eternalny1 7y ago
You don't mind that EVERYONE who isn't on your contact list is going to be asked to pay you? > The software will automatically ask those outside of your contact list to pay your inbox fee to send you emails.

niksmac 7y ago

Isn't it the same thing that earn.com does? Plus you get a chance to read the entire email?

oyebenny 7y ago
Yup!

theamk 7y ago

So why would advertisers pay for this? Surely people will sign up for thousands of email accounts, subscribe them all to every mailing list, then collect free money? 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

smaddock 7y ago

I posted on a Google forum recently and got two BitBounce replies in an hour, presumably from users autosubscribed to new threads. I'm going to need to start blocking all replies with the BitBounce template.

Justsignedup 7y ago

Facebook, of course, has blocked the ability to post a link to this site.

nsx147 7y ago

Great idea! I really wanted to use this...but then I dug into how it worked. 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

dangero 7y ago
None of it because the idea does not work for a number of documented reasons. This is not the first time this has been tried.
GnarfGnarf 7y ago
Is ".25%" a quarter of one percent? Vg. 0.0025? That doesn't seem much. 2.5¢ on a $10. transaction.

dangero 7y ago

We have a service that gets slammed by bitbounce messages requesting us to pay and I make sure to mark every single one as spam which shows why this won’t work. I can’t be the only one doing that.

benj111 7y ago
Can't you just sign up to bitbounce, and bounce the demands back?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dangero 7y ago
  Good idea but I don’t want to support the service in any way.
  - benj111 7y ago
    The service doesn't really bring anything new though, all you really need is to autoreply asking for payment, if you want to go the extra mile you can set up some way for people to actually pay you, I don't think that part would actually be required though.

ttul 7y ago

I have been working in anti-spam since 2003. BitBounce will fail just like GoodMail and Habeas before them. Why? Because marketers won’t pay to reach your inbox when they know it won’t improve their conversion rate. And after all, the email’s purpose is to convert actual business; not just to reach your eyeballs. 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.

techsin101 7y ago
Solid insights on both sides of market
aflag 7y ago
If people know they can pay 10p so that the important email they have to send will certainly not end up in the spam folder I think it will benefit everyone. And if all marketing email is being filtered and they don't see value in paying to get it delivered, everyone wins.
- Nursie 7y ago
  I don't want that world to exist.
Hitton 7y ago
This. Also this would be ripe for abuse, I can easily see nefarious actors setting up email accounts just to receive the paid emails and get money.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago

LeoPanthera 7y ago

I was actually quite excited until the "we use our own crytocurrency" part. 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.

jlgaddis 7y ago

Yet another Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (FUSSP) [0]. The ol' "form letter" [1] still makes me laugh every time I see it. [0]: https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html [1]: https://www.dmuth.org/fussp/ https://www.dmuth.org/fussp/

gingabriska 7y ago

It should be possible for the viewer to select a different dollar rate , everyone's time has a different value, so it makes sense to read only the emails who are willing to pay you for your time to acknowledge their offer. *Outside of the personal relationship

eternalny1 7y ago
Right on the site: "Set a price for your attention - Set a paywall price that businesses need to pay to send you marketing emails. "
- gingabriska 7y ago
  Thanks I missed that one :)

easytiger 7y ago

Total scam. On what planet does letting a dubious company hijack your email service and demand money from anyone who sends you an email count as a reasonable product? Dubious excuse to create an ICO at the expense of exploiting people's greed - a greed that will never be rewarded. That's without even considering how fundamental the flaws are in paying people to receive marketing

nathanbarry 7y ago

This is such a dumb service. Emails just get unsubscribed or reported as spam.

akidomowri 7y ago

> businesses who what to reach you This typo is in the first paragraph on your website. The very first paragraph.

mkagenius 7y ago

> BitBounce ... who _what_ to reach you. A typo there.

thih9 7y ago

Offtopic, kudos for linking „featured at” banners to actual mentions. I wish more landing pages did that. 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.

jbverschoor 7y ago

Good luck getting critical emails or confirmation emails

cr555 7y ago

first sentence gotta typo? "BitBounce is an email paywall that blocks spam and lets you get paid to receive marketing emails from businesses who what to reach you."

ericbarnes 7y ago

I sometimes work on the tech support side and I love when people email in, I respond with the answer, only to have my email come back with BitBounce. The really great part is when they are all upset that they haven't received an answer.

Waterluvian 7y ago

This reminds me of how Twitch streamers filter viewer comments. 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.

cvsisapharmacy 7y ago

This idea has merit, advertisers pay for access to our lives every which way from Sunday - except for email. But this will not be the solution. 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.