2021 BSV Hackathon winner Bitcoin Phone is set to create a new opportunity for language professionals worldwide to earn. By leveraging the peer-to-peer competencies of the BSV blockchain, creator Joe Thomas is able to develop the first Voice-Over-Bitcoin protocol that lets users on the BSV network make voice calls through Bitcoin transactions.
“You can call people, you can pay for them, you can set your rate, whatever you want. What you’re doing is you’re taking your audio data and you’re taking your money; you’re putting it into a Bitcoin packet; and you’re pushing it into the network.
And by doing so, anyone on the network can listen in, decrypt your data if they have the appropriate keys and listen to the audio that you’re sending. And your peer will do the exact same thing in reverse,” Thomas explained during his final presentation at the recently held CoinGeek Conference in New York.
What sets Bitcoin Phone apart from other communication apps is the fact that payments can be instantaneously sent and received. This is what makes it perfect for the tutoring and language services industries. And because the BSV blockchain continuously scales to be able to accommodate bigger data and increase its throughput, Bitcoin Phone is able to offer low transaction fees that will serve to make the market more competitive.
“We’re really targeting the tutoring and language-learning services. And these are both six- and 13-billion-dollar industries. And we’re attempting to disrupt them. So nowadays, if you want to hire a tutor and if you want to hire someone to help you learn a language, the platform that you do it on will charge somewhere between 15-30% in fees. But we’re able to bring that down to almost peanuts. And we’re able to that because of BSV,” Thomas revealed.
A student in America, for instance, may choose to take French lessons from a native French speaker in Haiti, which will cost less than a tutor in America with a degree in French. And doing all of this on Bitcoin Phone guarantees lower fees. In this way, both the tutor, who gains a wider market, and the student, who is able to avail of cheaper sessions, benefit.
Bitcoin Phone also offers identity verification and dispute handling features. The former allows for clients to securely verify their service provider’s credentials when needed, while the latter resolves low-trust situations easily. Because transactions are all signed, timestamped and recorded immutably on a distributed ledger system that is the BSV blockchain, low-trust situations, such as no-shows and inadequate teaching skills, can be resolved easily.
According to Thomas, who has formed his own team after his BSV Hackathon win, Bitcoin Phone will also add an auctioning feature on top of its protocol that will breed more competition. For example, a tutor’s morning slots are in high demand, clients can then place bids in order to win the coveted time slots.
“We’re going to add auctioning, which is impossible to do efficiently on the current Internet. But bidding in BSV is simple—it’s just data. That’s another thing we aim to provide, because you can’t do that natively with the [Bitcoin Phone] protocol, so that’s a service we will have to provide eventually,” Thomas said in a separate interview after his win.
Communication on the BSV blockchain made possible when Bitcoin Phone launches in the future open up a lot of opportunities, not only within the targeted industries, but also in developing a more dynamic Bitcoin Internet.
