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#Bitcoin Sats Email gatekeeper (LN) service
147 sats \ 12 comments \ @Misha_Dany 17 Oct 2022 bitcoin freebie

Inbox gatekeeper. Email curator. Micro-income generator.

Problem

  • Spam and low quality incoming emails steals your precious attention and time.
  • Anyone can get their subject line in front of you.
  • You can try to filter it out, but you cannot stop it and some spam will still go through and steal your attention.
!!! I hate spam and love sats !!!

The idea is simple

to reach your inbox, email sender has to pay you some #bitcoin #sats
  • We know, micropayments will change how we interact on the web & IRL.
  • Our devices already talk to each other and other devices.
  • With BTC LN our devices will stream each other Sats for services.
Why not to use the tech to save yourself some time, make a few sats, disrupt the spam email industry?
  • Free for the user.
  • Moreover, as a receiver, you can accumulate some SATS.
  • Think of it as a Paywall that requests miniscule payments to shiled from junk email. And there are other use cases, too.
You choose the price.
  • Maybe just enough to keep most spam away and accumulate a few sats for the mail that gets sent through.
  • You decide how much your attention & time are worth.
No fomo.
  • If a sender is not willing to pay a dime for their email, then very likely the mail is not worth your attention.
  • Contact and whitelists are excempt, of course.
I get it, email marketers, scammers, promoters and email spammers will not be happy. Cause spamming is no longer free..

You will be happy.

What do you think?
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510 sats \ 0 replies \ @timechain 17 Oct 2022
It's a great idea. It has very deep roots. Heres a short history of it's role in creating Bitcoin:
In the 90's, hackers posted damning material on the Church of Scientology. To do so, they used anonymous remailers, a tool envisioned by David Chaum, and worked on by (Satoshi candidates) Finney and later Sassaman. The Church struck back by spamming the Usenet groups. An idea for stopping the spam was to charge a fee. However, any existing way of doing so revealed the senders identity, opening the poster to litigation. Adam Back (another candidate) then created HashCash, powered by Proof of Work, which was later borrowed by Satoshi.
Heres a product thats working at the moment, reacher.me, as tweeted by Jack Mallers.
(Only thing is it requires a Strike account, which is not available everywhere and KYCs.) https://twitter.com/jackmallers/status/1521253419318710272?t=2sB8HEl-_Y5-u_UlzwegvA&s=19
I also heard this idea on a podcast a bit back. I reached out to the developer and he said the project is being put on hokd, because the person who he's working with is Ukrainian and has his hands full. Heres the podcast: https://bitcointv.com/w/8yurCAmimz3VKDpbRLzdgM
Most recently, I heard someone building a whole system on Lightning, called Vida which includes the paywalled email, as well as phone calls, video calls, zoom (streaming or e-conferences) with a sats/min thing as well. Heres the founder on Kevin Rooke https://www.kevinrooke.com/podcasts/e68-lyle-pratt-on-building-vida-communicating-on-lightning-and-helping-anyone-earn-for-their-time
Anyway, would LOVE to use such a product, keep me updated!
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155 sats \ 0 replies \ @Misha_Dany OP 17 Oct 2022 freebie
Hey all, thanks for your replies!
What I hear is:
  • Reacher is cool, but requires Strike account AND using their email address.
  • Vida is also cool, but,...signed up and wow it's pretty build out already. Impressed
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10 sats \ 6 replies \ @k00b 17 Oct 2022
Awesome! Reacher beat you to it though.
I also think solutions like this suffer from many people - who might otherwise send me email I want to receive - not having sats. I think it might be better to allow people to pay for priority in a person's inbox rather than prevent them from sending at all. Or, perhaps, emails without sats or presence on the whitelist, go to another folder.
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100 sats \ 4 replies \ @timechain 17 Oct 2022
Yep. Last I saw though, you need a Strike account. : (
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 17 Oct 2022
Good point, perhaps there's an opportunity for something that doesn't require a Strike account!
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155 sats \ 2 replies \ @Misha_Dany OP 18 Oct 2022 freebie
My biggest concern with Reacher is privacy - another layer, trust to a private company.
Also, ideally, I'd want to hold on to my original email address and just have a paywall-service layer sorting my emails.
That way If I needed to - I could still go and see all emails sent to me in some folder that's tucked away.
Anyhow, keeping my eyes out on a service that I can use. Else, might have to build something, lol
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155 sats \ 1 reply \ @timechain 18 Oct 2022
Just an idea off the top of my head on a possible path: you know how there is a place for a message with a LN payment? you somehow automate a way to put the sender's email address in there, which temporarily whitelists the email address for one message.
Also, so I know monetizing software is a bit taboo in the Bitcoin space, but instead of relying on donations, you can take a small % (1 to 5%) of the sats to help keep it nice and maintained well. If you make it FOSS, someone will copy it anyway and put out a free, but not well-maintained version anyway.
Built in monetization models are great. Bitcoin is made out of incentives. If we had a professional, working version of every product that was started on Bitcoin, but was abandoned due to the developers not getting anything out of it, Bitcoin would be decades ahead.
Also, if the model could support itself that way, it could stay ad-free. Because ads go hand in hand with collecting data.
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155 sats \ 0 replies \ @Misha_Dany OP 18 Oct 2022 freebie
Love the idea.
Also, "monetizing software is a bit taboo". Seriously, wth! Except the miners, which is at the core of why the bitcoin network works in the first place, lol!
We can make a case that NOT monetizing is anti-Bitcoin.
Anyhow We should ALWAYS monetize, and it does not have to be seen as bad or done is some shitty way.
  1. Release open source. Most people won't bother self-hosting anything.
  2. Offer hosting / service for a fee.
We won't reach any meaningful adoption without proper incentives.
" If we had a professional, working version of every product that was started on Bitcoin, but was abandoned due to the developers not getting anything out of it, Bitcoin would be decades ahead."
^ Now that's a great idea @timechain!
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Misha_Dany OP 17 Oct 2022 freebie
Yeah I've been thinking about folder structure, where all Sats emails sit in a folder similar Social or Promotions in gmail.
  • That way, these paid emails are not disctracting.
  • You'll have an option to never see them, or scroll through in your free time.
This angle is more of a spam blocker. Another feature is to do something like Vida platform or many of the OnlyFans like platforms. But for now I just wish the spam industry shrinks
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @cryptocoin 18 Oct 2022
Think of it as a Paywall that requests miniscule payments to shiled from junk email.
I think that's where the issue breaks down. This request is sent via e-mail reply, right?
So if Bob sends a message to you, and your service sends to Bob an reply/invoice saying he needs to pay bitcoin, Bob might then mark your service's reply/invoice message as spam.
Then later when Jen sends you a message, and your service sends to Jen a reply/invoice, Jen's e-mail service (e.g., gmail) might automatically assume your reply/invoice to Jen is spam (since many others have marked their reply/invoice messages as spam). So then Jen assumes you have ghosted her without a reply, which would be unfortunate because now you will not know about the next weekend BBQ of Jens that you would normally attend.
So it is SMTP that would need to have some type protocol change to accommodate this. And little is as resistant to change as the protocol for a core internet service.
In the end, I too would like to see an attempt along these lines (to make mass spamming expensive), but over time I find my usage of e-mail to occur less and less frequently. There are exceptions, and I use a service where I can whitelist certain senders (and trigger a notification on my mobile).
So for me, I feel the e-mail spammers are actually doing us all a favor by essentially forcing us towards methods better than e-mail for communicating.
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193 sats \ 0 replies \ @Misha_Dany OP 18 Oct 2022 freebie
" e-mail spammers are actually doing us all a favor by essentially forcing us towards methods better than e-mail for communicating."
yeah, I hear you. I'd love to move away from emails entirely. And mail for that matter.
But just like mail, it's still used for really important (usually government-related stuff like taxes, DMV, Medical / insurance companies). Hence, gotta maintain a mailing address, that's not a P.O. Box. At least in the US. Can't abondon it.
Maybe other countries have a better shot at moving to the better tech.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 17 Oct 2022
I remember earn.com had a custodial version of this you could connect with your gmail and I know strike offers this service to for its users, i'd love to have something like this that I could connect on something like LN bits would be great
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