Most of us have posted reviews of our most or least favorite restaurant or hotel experiences at some point. The concept of reviews is not new, but the business model is outdated and broken. Reviews are often inauthentic and not verified by responsible businesses. The trend, however, is beginning to change. Amazon, for instance, posts only “verified” reviews. In a recent virtual chat between CoinGeek and U.S.-based company Britevue, we touched upon some interesting facets of the online review industry.
Britevue is an incentive-based online review platform where users can earn money for interactions with their reviews. A sponsor of the CoinGeek Zurich Conference in June 2021, Britevue founder and CEO Connor Murray spoke about his company’s projects as it relates to the digital currency market.
Murray told CoinGeek that Britevue will fix three specific problems in the reviews space. The first issue is about incentives. Users only post reviews when they feel slighted and seek a form of revenge. They do not get tangible rewards for their reviews, making it crucial to create an incentive mechanism into the online review space.
Another issue that Britevue is working to resolve is authenticity. The company uses the BSV enterprise blockchain to issue a proof of purchase onto the blockchain that can be linked to the review later, which will help verify that the person leaving the review is the same one who purchased the product.
The third issue is that businesses do not know how to reward users for good reviews. Britevue will enable them to issue rewards such as coupons, gift cards, etc., in exchange for reviews. For instance, Dunkin Donuts in the U.S. sometimes offers customers free coffee the next time they come in. “We want to make it very easy for all businesses to do this, and fortunately, Bitcoin’s tokenization capabilities allow us to do that. We are currently building a business portal where businesses can come in and manage on-chain rewards for consumers that leave reviews,” Murray said.
When asked why he preferred BSV blockchain over others, Murray candidly said that any database could solve problems, but the blockchain is better because it is a global public timestamped ledger. There is a way to validate that something occurred at a particular place on a specific date.
“Switzerland is an important country financially, and since Bitcoin revolutionizes financing in such a modern way, I cannot wait to be there,” Murray said. Recalling his memories of the CoinGeek Seoul Conference, he said local organizations there helped him understand how global digital currency is.
Why Britevue is sponsoring CoinGeek Zurich
So why sponsor the upcoming CoinGeek Zurich conference? Murray said it was an easy decision to make, remembering the Pitch Day events and previous conferences as incredible networking events and recalled the great professional and personal relationships he made there.
The most significant value of CoinGeek conferences, Murray said, is to meet individuals in person that usually hide behind their “virtual avatars.” Entrepreneurs and inventors meet like-minded people and share a common goal of understanding and optimizing BSV ecosystem.
He further said Britevue is in the initial phase of building the database and it can get more users by sponsoring the upcoming conference. “We launched our public site not so long ago. We are using properties of BSV, including microtransaction, to build a database by encouraging users to enter information about their hometown. By sponsoring the conference, we can get more people on board.”
Drawing a correlation between their business model and CoinGeek conferences, he said Britevue is all about travel and conferences happening across the globe. Britevue offers great features that target travel influencers and bloggers and allow them to monetize the information they deliver in the form of reviews.
Speaking about the changing role of miners, he said they are creating history by pushing limits, allowing BSV to scale in more giant blocks and complex transactions. The Bitcoin space is noticing advanced scripting capabilities by processing some of the most complex transactions.
Murray explained that for almost a decade, a central development group dictated to the miners how they should behave and unilaterally told them what the block size should be. Nonetheless, things have changed, and miners might soon become the actual stewards in this space.
On the flip side, miners struggle to make decisions because they still seek experts that help navigate the risks. They must take these things into consideration—the level of risk they are willing to take and ensuring they have a good revenue stream. Right now, their entire revenue comes from the block reward diminishing subsidy.
Murray wants the audience to take home the message that any individual can travel the world, share that experience (reviews), and monetize it. He mentions how the online review platform first came out 15-20 years ago, and people were writing reviews and building a brand for themselves on websites like Yelp. It did not seem very practical, but a few did make a living by posting reviews because businesses funded them.
When asked why Britevue chose the BSV blockchain as a base for content creation or as a revenue platform, he said using blockchain enables them to have one global database. Citing an example of how browsing a pizzeria place shows different results on Google than TripAdvisor because two siloed databases are not connected.
Britevue is building the database in line with Metanet protocols—that is, there will be one pointer for each location containing different data underneath it about that location. It will have one blockchain schema where everything is connected and continually updated.
He said, “I’d use BSV for content creation because it has cryptography built in so you can have things encrypted and decrypted easily. It has many benefits, but that’s one of the most important ones.”
Connor Murray is joining a panel on “Small Payments, Big Power: Micro & Nano-Payments with BSV” on Day 1 of CoinGeek Zurich conference, alongside Slictionary co-founder John Pitts, HandCash co-founder and CEO Alex Agut, and Vaionex co-founder and CEO Robin Kohze. Register for free today to watch Murray and other thought leaders in the blockchain and digital currency space talk about igniting the power of data at CoinGeek Conference.
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