Jeff Baek: Spreading BSV across the internet

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One of the most discussed presentations at CoinGeek New York was by a newcomer to its conferences, Jeffrey Baek. His PeerSend product offers what appears to be an almost magical integration of BSV with existing websites such as Twitter, and, to come, Amazon.

PeerSend works through a Chrome extension which allows Jeff to superimpose his own PeerSend icons onto tweets, for instance, providing an instant mechanism for paying anyone on Twitter.

If, as a Twitter user and BSV wallet-holder, you send money to someone who doesn’t know anything about BSV and has maybe not even heard of it, no problem! That person will see a tweet in their feed which invites them to collect whatever you have sent them (denoted in fiat, not BSV) through a Handcash wallet. They have to sign up to Handcash to collect the money.

And if the target of your generosity doesn’t respond to your gift, don’t worry: your donation will be returned to you after 24 hours, so you can try to find someone more grateful.

It’s a simple onboarding process that could swell the numbers of BSVers spectacularly. And that’s part of Jeff’s motivation, he says: “In order for Bitcoin to expand the ecosystem, we’ve been doing pretty well building our own siloed BSV services. But we wanted a service that could help out non-BSV people.”

Twitter is just one example of the use of PeerSend, which Jeff explains more generally on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations:

“You’ll be able to send BSV pretty much anywhere on the internet, any web pages, any social media platform, as long as you see a Paymail address somewhere. So if you see a Paymail address on, say, a Medium post, then the extension will highlight the Paymail and from there you’ll be able to send money directly with just one click.”

PeerSend is a kind of identity management system which Jeff hopes will eliminate the inefficiencies of today’s internet where users need to register separately with each business. It would mean, he says, that platforms don’t ‘own you’ as they do now. With PeerSend, all those separate relationships could be “merged together into a single identity and single cash system.” Jeff’s vision is of a seamless online experience where you only have to give your identity and financial details once, for use across the internet: “It’s not bound to a currency or country or platform or anything like that.”

So how is that going to work in practice, when it comes to Amazon, for instance, where Jeff says you’ll be able to buy things without even registering for an Amazon account?

“When you submit your home address at PeerSend, then we’ll create a Buy button on the product that you see on Amazon or eBay, and then you click to purchase it. Then we will take care of the currency conversion and order on behalf of you so that Amazon can deliver the product that you just bought.”

Jeff’s Peer Technologies is based in Seoul, South Korea, and has eight staff now. His current projects are just the start of his ambitions. He also has plans to build a BSV browser: “unless Bitcoin has its own browser that is fundamentally different from the existing browsers and has a money layer built in, it’s very difficult for Bitcoin to succeed.”

Hear the whole of Jeffrey Baek’s interview in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations podcast or catch up with other recent episodes:

You can also watch the podcast video on YouTube.

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