Peer-to-Peer voice-over-Bitcoin protocol platform Bitcoin Phone has won the fourth BSV Hackathon, and it promises the creation of a dynamic Bitcoin web once it is up and running. Enabling communication on the blockchain is the first step in the evolution of a better and more efficient Bitcoin-based Internet.
“If you think about Bitcoin before this, most of the interactions are very static – you upload a file onto the chain, you read a file from the chain. What I’m presenting here is making it a dynamic Internet—you can communicate with someone on the network. After I won, I realized there is something here that people really care about and they really see the potential,” Bitcoin Phone creator Joe Thomas said.
Bitcoin Phone allows users on the BSV blockchain to communicate with each other through voice calls. And these voice calls are linked to payments, which means that users can subscribe to and provide services, and pay and be paid instantly.
“The plan in some respect is to continue the development of the payment channel technology. The ultimate long-running goal is to see how much of this peer-to-peer communication that we already do on the Internet can move to Bitcoin. We want to provide payment channel connection services, both for the phone application but potentially others,” Thomas revealed.
Bitcoin Phone is targeting the six-billion-dollar tutoring and 13-billion-dollar language services industries. This will create a new avenue for tutors and language teachers worldwide to reach potential clients and also allow students to be able to access tutorial services at a more competitive price.
“So nowadays, if you want to hire a tutor and if you want to hire someone to help you learn a language, the platform that you do it on will charge somewhere between 15-30% in fees. But we’re able to bring that down to almost peanuts. And we’re able to that because of BSV. And the best part is, anyone, anywhere can teach language or a skill without needing Bitcoin. The only people that would need Bitcoin are people who are buying stuff,” Thomas explained when he presented Bitcoin Phone in front of a panel of judges during the eighth CoinGeek Conference in New York.
Because BSV is the largest and the only infinitely scalable blockchain, it can offer the lowest transaction fees. As the network scales, bigger blocks can be mined at higher throughput at lower fees that are just small fragments of a cent.
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“This is the cheapest and most efficient way to do transactions. No other blockchain as we know can support this at scale. And no other Bitcoin is cheap enough to support this. We thought about using Lightning, but it was a mess because we have to hop between six or seven different people and half the time it may not even work. And we’re also limited by the bandwidth of these smallest connections in that lightning path,” Thomas stated.
Bitcoin Phone is also not limited to tutorial services and can be applicable to other professions, such as psychologists providing counseling sessions. It is equipped with an identity verification feature if clients would require credentials from service providers, such as diplomas and certificates. In case of disputes and no-shows, all signed transactions are immutably recorded on the BSV blockchain, and they can easily be accessed and verified to settle low-trust situations.
