Fresh off Bitcoin 2022, Mallers and Strike continue innovating. Covered: Bitcoin Fixes Spam? Pay-to-Play Bitcoin Fixes Spam? On May 2nd, Jack Mallers tweeted out a new Bitcoin email product that has been built on Strike’s API. Marketplaces use Strike’s API to enable payments between buyers and sellers or fans and creators. Merchants use Strike’s API “to […] The post Jack Mallers Touts New BTC Product appeared first on CryptosRus.

Jack Mallers Touts New BTC Product

Fresh off Bitcoin 2022, Mallers and Strike continue innovating.

Covered:

  • Bitcoin Fixes Spam?
  • Pay-to-Play

Bitcoin Fixes Spam?

On May 2nd, Jack Mallers tweeted out a new Bitcoin email product that has been built on Strike’s API. Marketplaces use Strike’s API to enable payments between buyers and sellers or fans and creators. Merchants use Strike’s API “to accept payments from customers globally.” If you recall, Strike is the Bitcoin payments app that recently partnered with Shopify to bring BTC payments to merchants worldwide.

The product, called Reacher, is an interesting development from Strike. Innovating on the old-school but heavily used Email protocol, Reacher seeks to partially solve the “spam problem” with Bitcoin. As we all are aware of, email is plagued by spam, ad junk, and other useless stuff. Still, we continue to use email and carry on. Mallers calls email “the most successful mass-communication scheme of all time” but noted it “has always had a spam issue.”

He cites an article from Yahoo stating that 88% of worldwide email traffic is pure spam, and this costs businesses and consumers “an estimated $100M per year.” The reason spam is so prevalent is due to the permission-less nature of email and because it’s completely free to use. Mallers goes on to say that the ideal solution to the spam problem is “a cost to the sender, and an ability for the receiver to monetize their time and attention.”

Pay-to-Play 

So paying $1 of Bitcoin via the Lightning Network, you will be able to increase the chances of Mr. Mallers reading your mail. The idea does make sense on its face. Say you are attending a conference for the week–you could share your Reacher email. Mallers says his current email is “unusable, with 50k+ emails, and only a fraction I asked for.” Now, anyone with a Strike account can get a Reacher email at Reacher.me.

You set the price to contact you, “and anyone that sends you an email will get a reply with a Bitcoin Lightning invoice. After it’s paid, the email will be forwarded to your real email.” The code is all open source and can be viewed on Github here. It was done at a hackathon, and Mallers says it has “solved one of the internet’s oldest problems for me and my email.”

Could this solution be used to solve the Twitter spam problem? Perhaps. “Cost to use” is precisely why you never see spam attacks (usually via bots) on Ethereum. In fact, spam attacks are the exact reason Solana gets overloaded over and over. It is infinitesimally cheap to use, which allows for spam. If you wish to give Reacher a try and see how its relay system works, visit their website here.

Recommended: How To Save On Transaction Fees With The Bitcoin Lightning Network

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