Lin Zheming talks incentivizing email with Bitcoin SV

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One of the beautiful things about Bitcoin SV (BSV) is it’s power to bring people closer together through peer to peer interactions. That applies from the most average user to the ritziest of celebrities. At the CoinGeek Seoul conference, Mempool founder and CEO Lin Zheming joined our Stephanie Tower to describe his company’s efforts to bring more people together through the power of Bitcoin.

Zheming has been hard at work making better wallets for BSV, particularly using simplified payment verification (SPV) technology, which allows faster peer-to-peer transactions. Tower asked him what he learned in the process.

“I think that we build a demo to demonstrate how to build a right SPV wallet,” he began. “So I think in the industry there are no good example for full-functioning SPV wallet, so we build one. We demonstrate the ability of the SPV wallet through the email exchange, between peer to peer. The email is a truly peer to peer, from a user to another user. We use the email as the underlying layer to transmit transactions from peer to peer.”

One innovation coming from Mempool is ‘Paid Inbox’, which creates a financial incentive for high profile users to connect with their fans. “We are trying to solve the problem that any celebrity will have a lot of fans trying to reach her or him,” he said. “If we charge more amount of money for them to send email to their star, so that would monetize the fans for the celebrity.”

Tower asked what this system offers to the fan to incentivize them as well. “I think it works both ways,” he replied. “You can just, like, you send your friend or you send celebrity an email, and with money attached with it. And it’s done with the [incentive] to collect your money, the celebrity will have the incentive to open your message and read your message.”

The beauty of the system is the simplicity of it. Everyone understands email, and any email system will do. “And if you have your public key linked to your identity, I think we will eventually move beyond email, we can use any other ways to communicate between two public keys,” Zheming added. “So the main purpose for this is we create am method for peer to peer to exchange their valued, to exchange your information. Right now, only email event structure, but it doesn’t matter which way we chose. We can use cell phones, right? So if we find a way to connect cell phone number with public key, and then we can just use SMS or MMS to send and receive funds.”

Tower finally asked if there are any early adopters lining up for this new feature. “We have friends from some crypto space first,” he said. “They were assertive and it creates the ability for them to earn more coins.”