Fourth BSV Hackathon winner Bitcoin Phone is set to make the tutoring and language services industries more competitive as it aims to provide a more practical solution to tutoring needs.
By being the first-ever voice-over-Bitcoin protocol and allowing voice calls to be made on the BSV blockchain that are linked to payments, Bitcoin Phone allows tutors and other language professionals all over the world to provide services to a wider market.
“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,” Canadian developer Joe Thomas, the creator of Bitcoin Phone, said.
For instance, a Japanese or South Korean student in need of tutorial services for English may choose to hire a proficient English speaker from the Philippines at a cheaper price rather than a native English speaker from America or Canada. In this way, capable professionals from hard-to-reach regions will be able to offer their services without having to be a part of larger organizations that take a large pay cut.
“We’re really targeting the tutoring and language-learning services. And these are both six- and 13-billion-dollar industries. And we’re attempting to disrupt them. 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,” Thomas pointed out during his presentation at the recently concluded CoinGeek Conference in New York.
What makes it more competitive is that the BSV blockchain has the lowest transaction fees in the market, which is why Bitcoin Phone will only be efficient and practical on this public blockchain that has the ability for unlimited scaling.
Transaction fees become expensive when the blockchain is incapable of scaling. Why? Simply because the data blocks and throughput are very limited; however, this limit is removed through continuous scaling. It is somewhat analogous to retailers and suppliers. Because suppliers are able to offer orders in bulk, they are also capable of lowering their prices to wholesale rates.
In a way, the same concept goes with blockchain transactions, although there are other technical factors involved. For instance, BTC only has 1MB-sized blocks and can only process seven transactions per second (tps). Thus, its current average fee per transaction amounts to $2.65, with peaks that reached $62.78 last April. Compare this to BSV’s over 5,000 tps, which will further be increased to 50,000 tps soon, with fees of just fractions of a penny, and it is evident why scaling matters.
“[BSV] 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 revealed.
Both clients and language professionals will benefit from having low transaction fees. While clients will pay a lot less, tutors will be able to find new clients on their own and keep all the profit to themselves.
