Direct Mail Delivery

You can use BiblePay to make physical deliveries of mail (including letters, postcards, greeting cards and gift cards).

Example Use Cases

Let's assume you want to send a friend a catch-up letter, or someone a thank you letter, or an invoice. You can create the text of the letter inside biblepay, add them as a delivery contact, and click Send. BiblePay will print the letter in full color and physically deliver the letter.

What if you want to mail a postcard to many recipients for a marketing campaign? You can do that too. You can create a 4x6 postcard and mail this to all of your recipients on your contact list.

How about a greeting card? Yes, you can create a Christmas card, and have this instantly sent within the convenience of BiblePay.

Finally, you can also create a greeting card with a virtual gift card in it. The way this works is you pick the target amount (in USD) of the virtual gift card. BiblePay will create a "pass phrase" for the gift. We will include a piece of text in the greeting card explaining that the recipient has received a gift for N amount of USD in BBP, along with the passphrase and the instructions to claim the BBP. When that user launches BBP, they can type the phrase directly into BiblePay and unlock the funds.

Note that as of April 15th, 2021, these features are in testnet and the expected launch date is July 2021. As of April, we currently have one Greeting Card and one Gift card option. The rest of the features will be added during our development cycles based on demand.

SETUP ENVIRONMENT

Before moving further, please set up your environment first. The "From Address" needs to be populated inside biblepay before you can send any mail deliveries. In this first version, we do not yet have a UI to send a card so please use these RPC commands.

First we need to store your pickup information (this is used for the front of the mailing and comes into play if a mailing is undeliverable - this lets the carrier mail it back to you). This information only needs entered once and we automatically re-use it.

To enter this information type: exec setmyaddress "john doe,1001 main st,goodwin,AL,30500"

Note that we require the address information to be Name,Address-line-1,city,state,zip as above (comma separated) and inside quotes as above.

User Data Protection and Security

Note that we understand the need for your data to be secure and that no one wants their home address and or friends stored in the block chain. Therefore the way this solution works is Your personal information (Your name, address, city, state, zip and contact info) is stored in unreadable binary as hex in your config file (we do not store this in the chain or on the network or in the data files, but in the biblepay.conf file). Next, when you send a mail delivery out to a recipient, we do not store the recipient on the chain either. We package the recipient in an XML block and send it directly to the mail carrier. For tracking, we plan on tracking your delivery by TXID only and any update information will be relayed directly from the delivery carrier to your bbp client over TCP. This ensures privacy of your delivery contact information. We will never store your address or recipients on the chain or outside of the core client in this solution.

How do I create a Christmas Card and have it delivered

Note that we plan on adding more than one type of card, but for now we only have a Christmas card. Additionally in this first phase, most of the text is not configurable, but we allow you to insert a customized paragraph, and a customized Gift-card. Of course, the To information is customizable, and your signature is customized based on your From information (we automatically sign the card in cursive script for you).

exec testmail "Destination Name,Destination Address-Line-1,Destination City,Destination State,DestinationZip" "Your custom paragraph goes here!" gift_amount_in_usd 0

Please replace the Destination information with your recipient name and address and be sure to use the commas to separate the Name,Address,City,State,Zip and use the Quotes around the destination. You can type up to 512 characters extra into the custom paragraph.

Note that you can either send 0 for the gift_amount_in_usd if you do not want to include a gift. If you use an amount, BBP will auto-convert the amount to BBP, and spend a transaction from your wallet into a "passphrase" account. The passphrase will automatically be included in the mailing (please take a look at the PDF proof that appears after you send it in dry run).

Finally, the last 0 above means "dry run" (use 0 for dry run or 1 for real). If its a dry run, you will see the cost and a proof first. If a 1 is sent, the bbp will be spent, and the item will be set up for delivery, and a proof will be returned.

The cost of this service is currently $1 per one-page card (that includes the gift card too). Therefore if you send a gift of $10 to someone, the cost is $11. If you send it without a gift, the cost is $1.

What is a proof? A proof is the rendered card that will be delivered in the form of a PDF. To test this system, set your delivery information and paragraph and send "0" (for dry run). The command will output a "PDF" row with a URL (this is the proof). Open this in a web browser and review it. If you are happy with it, go ahead and send it with "1".

What is a BIBLEPAY Pass Phrase for a gift card

This is a novel feature created by us that allows you to send BBP to a street address instead of a biblepay address. The way this works is we take the recipient street address, and run it through our hasher to create a deterministic 256 bit private key (this is case and punctuation and space sensitive). This creates a keypair that can be used like any other address. When we send your gift amount to a passphrase, we send it to that corresponding public key. When the recipient opens the gift card, they have to type in the passphrase (the physical address) to unlock the funds. At that point we derive the private key and load that key into their wallet, therefore they will receive the value.

How do I unlock a BiblePay gift card?

From the RPC type

acceptgift "Your physical address or passphrase"

Where the passphrase is the phrase included in your mailing. Note this is case sensitive AND punctuation AND space sensitive, and must be included in quotes.