
BitBounce – Email paywall that lets you get paid to receive marketing emails - potench
https://bitbounce.com/
======
ttul
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.

~~~
Hitton
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.

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duskwuff
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
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
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
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.

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jlgaddis
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/)

------
dangero
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
Can't you just sign up to bitbounce, and bounce the demands back?

~~~
dangero
Good idea but I don’t want to support the service in any way.

~~~
benj111
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.

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theamk
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

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LeoPanthera
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.

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smaddock
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.

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RichardHeart
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.

~~~
dangero
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
That sounds comedically frustrating!

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cvsisapharmacy
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.

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

~~~
oyebenny
Yup!

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ericbarnes
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.

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nsx147
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
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.

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

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jbverschoor
Good luck getting critical emails or confirmation emails

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Justsignedup
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
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.

------
thih9
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.

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

------
Waterluvian
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.

------
easytiger
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

------
akidomowri
> businesses who what to reach you

This typo is in the first paragraph on your website. The very first paragraph.

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liamcardenas
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.

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cr555
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."

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mkagenius
> BitBounce ... who _what_ to reach you.

A typo there.

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gingabriska
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
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
Thanks I missed that one :)

