Saving the Internet: BSV Wales virtual meetup dives into online reviews, advertising and social media

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The BSV enterprise blockchain is saving the Internet. That’s the theme of the recently held BSV Wales meetup, a virtual event featuring two of the brightest minds in the Bitcoin space who delved into how their startups are using Bitcoin to better the Internet.

BSV Wales: Saving the Internet https://t.co/R4mCjpXVT9

— BSV Association (@BSV_Assn) August 9, 2021

Connor Murray took to the virtual stage first to talk about the challenges that face the Internet today and how blockchain technology can solve them. One of these, though it may seem beneficial at first glance, is that the Internet is subsidized. This allows “all manner of crap” to get to the users, especially since the Internet mostly runs on the ad-based model. The Internet is also insecure and lacks a simple, affordable and secure payment model.

Bitcoin solves these challenges by offering a native way of making payments over the Internet, a peer to peer method of secure communication and a global timestamp ledger to enable full auditability.

Murray is the founder of Britevue, formerly TrueReviews, a online review company that incentivizes users through Bitcoin rewards. The Internet lacks an incentive model to leave reviews even though reviews are becoming one of the popular ways to attract new clients.

To further solve the challenge of fake reviews, Britevue has launched Veritas, “an API that anyone can use to solve fake reviews.”

The Internet’s advertising model is yet another tenet that’s broken and in dire need of a solution, and Luke Rohenaz has been working to provide one. Rohenaz is the founder of TonicPow, a Bitcoin SV-based advertising ecosystem and promotion marketplace.

In his presentation, Rohenaz updated the audience on what his team has been up over the past year. These include an entirely new web platform, a full featured API that users can integrate with other applications, private and localized campaigns, a streaming widget, email notifications and more. Rohenaz revealed that TonicPow further intends to introduce on-chain campaigns, credit card payments and more.

The biggest announcement from Rohenaz was that TonicPow was getting into tokens in the not-so-far future. Promoters will be able to earn tokens for sharing campaigns while advertisers will get to fund campaigns with tokens and offer their promoters a chance to win NFTs for sharing.

With the BSV space seeing a rapidly rising number of token protocols, Rohenaz said that TonicPow would be protocol-agnostic. “We plan on letting the market figure that out and we’re not trying to put our thumb on the scale too much.”

David Club also joined the virtual meetup to talk about the Fediverse and why surveillance capitalism is bad. Fediverse is a federated social network that’s decentralized and distributed across distinct providers. Unlike the ‘conventional’ social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Fediverse consists of multiple social sites, but users can communicate to other users on other sites.