Bitcoin Forum

I, and I assume many other people, feel that bitcoin will take off once it finds some killer app that really makes use of the strength of BTC. And anyone with any amount of BTC benefits greatly from bitcoin taking off since that will cause the price to skyrocket. So we should all be very interested in this happening.

The best use of BTC I can think of that also has the benefit of spreading the idea of BTC rapidly is a tipping service. Here are some key parts of the service that I and other people have thought of:

o  Twitter tipping system.
 Allow people to tweet BTC tips to other twitter users. Has great
potential to go viral and spread throughout the entire twitter
population.
 A twitter user would just tweet to us: #tip @bob
then we would tweet this fact to bob and send him 1 BTC
If bob already was registered with us then great. Otherwise we would
give him a link to register and claim his coin.
Obviously can spread quickly since this stuff will show up in people's
twitter feeds.
And I think people will like publicly showing their support for what they are tipping.

o   Web based tipping.
A browser plugin that allows you to tip the webpage, facebook page or
blog you are currently reading. The page doesn't have to know about
the tipping service. If it is some new page we will scrape it or the
site for an email address that seems appropriate and send the tip to
it.
Once tipped the site owner will be encouraged to place a tip button on
their site thus spreading the knowledge of the service.

o   SMS tipping.
A service that allows you to send small BTC amounts by text message to
any phone that can receive SMS.
they would just text to our number: send <amount> <number>
Basically the same as the twitter thing but with SMS.

o   Forum tipping plugin.
Plugin for popular forum software allowing people to tip posters they like.

The beauty of all these is that they only require the tipper to know
about the service. Once people are tipped they will naturally want to
find about it to retrieve their coins. I think it would spread pretty
quickly. People who own BTC have extra incentive to tip since tipping will increase the popularity of BTC and thus the value of the BTC that they own.

If you make this you should call it CoinToss :)

Let me steal your idea and implement it!

I think this could work really well.
It doesn't seem that involved to program and I'm with you that it would spread like mad once people realized it was working.
Obviously before it becomes semi popular a lot of people are going to think scam.
The twitter part seems especially easy.

I'd make it possible to send less than 1btc though, it would be nice if you could decide.

(adding thread to my watchlist)

> Let me steal your idea and implement it!

This is what I want. I want someone to implement this.

It's nice to be part of a community where people want others to act on their ideas to better the whole.
Such a nice change from hiding all your IP to keep it safe from competition.

+1

+1
should we start a bounty for the programmer?

I'm for it.  I'll need to change some USD to btc, running out hah.

But won't the possibility of anything going viral still be stunted by the sheer difficulty of the average person obtaining bitcoins at this point in time?

where do you see such difficulty ? you mean paypal fraud shit ?
I will exchange all the BTC newbies may need for WU or bank wire
or any other non reversable currency you may find.

> But won't the possibility of anything going viral still be stunted by the sheer difficulty of the average person obtaining bitcoins at this point in time?
That is sort of a separate problem that belongs in a separate thread but this doesn't seem hard to me: http://bitcoinmorpheus.tumblr.com/How_to_buy_mt_gox_usd_with_paypal

It does deserve another thread.  I was alluding to this one: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5368.0

How does 1 mBTC sound as a default tip?  Nobodies going to throw BTCs around in bulk, but I'd be willing to go on a tipping spree at that rate.

It would be nice if the system didn't require registration.  A bitcoin address is 34 characters, so there's room for two addresses plus a lot of metadata.  A content producer's client could tweet "BTC address: 18VqR8RgHmY6tG9Y8JXbkM8zncVm8npt1p"  (for instance!) and the tipping client could parse their twitter stream for the most recent address and send the tip.

In the event that the receiver hasn't tweeted a receipt address, as will be the norm in the beginning, the tip could be placed in the sender's local escrow and an @mention with the amount donated, to be accepted within 72 hours, with a link to bitcoin.org or weusebitcoin.com.

I think a browser plugin would be the easiest way to implement this right now.  Extensions for Firefox and Chrome would probably cover most of the interested market.

Could also make it so if they don't collect it in 10 days or 90 days or whatever it gets donated to charity.
Don't really need that option but why not and I'd feel better knowing worst case scenario it goes to charity.

Not if the default tip was some truly significant amount, like 1btc. Then someone who gets six tips on a tweet could still tip .5btc to a dozen people and not feel like a cheap bastard. Eventually they'll run into someone who is oldschool with bitcoin and that person will be more likely to stick with the 1btc default, process begins anew.

I feel if this takes off 1mBTC will be the threshold of sarcasm. It's the equivalent of tossing a busker a handful of pennies, might as well not do it at all unless you mean to be insulting.


Good idea jed. Really good idea.


Edit: also 1btc is maybe the lower limit of meaning for new users. And if it's not worth US$0.65 is it worth the spam factor? You don't want to be seen as spammers, that's for sure.

I don't think the price of the Dollar should matter. Having said that, the minimum amount allowed shouldn't be hardcoded into the system,  an easilly changeable setting would be a much better alternative, and don't forget that if things go as planned, in the future even a fraction of a satoshi will be worth a lot.


Oh, and +1 regarding the idea of having an expiration date for the retrieval of the tips; perhaps the service would take a small percentage and donate the rest to the charity (or simply the Bitcoin address) of choice of the tipster; not only this would reduce the wastage of coins but having a deadline to pick up the money might stimulate people to not let it go more than if the money stayed was promised to stay there forever.

It's too bad that I can't execute at this project.

We need more entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs with faster OODA loop!

Someone suggested a service like this for witcoin.com
At the moment we have charities included in the sites distribution but what if we could extract a URL from a post and set aside a pot for the website and they could claim it?

There are a couple of problems with this such as verifying the actual site owner and actually contacting them in an automated fashion


Possibly to claim the reward they would include a btc address in their site metadata

A web spider could then find it.

 

Looks like Flattr is adding a way to "pay any twitter user" (regardless of whether or not that user has a Flattr account).
  http://blog.flattr.net/2011/04/flattr-reloads-the-cannons (http://blog.flattr.net/2011/04/flattr-reloads-the-cannons)

and Tip The Web does this now as well:
  http://tiptheweb.org/

Oh this idea is awesome. Are you guys serious about a bounty? I'd love to give it a go. :)

I like the idea of it being 'internets' where 1 internet = 1mBTC, so you could say '1000 internets to that man!'.

How do you transfer the money though? You enter a twitter name, type 0.10 BTC, hit send - do you have to charge up your 'tipjar' first? Or do you do the transfer direct from your bitcoin client on your PC and the tipjar just sends the '@recipient you recieved 0.10 BTC from @bob' once you see the block appear?

I don't use Twitter often, but here's my stab at a method for implementing this:

*Assuming the thing is called TweetTip. Could be anything. Just to get the idea across...

Step 1) tweet "#tip @bob 1BTC" to the TweetTip account (as suggested)
Step 2) TweetTip tweets back with a unique Bitcoin Address and probably "@bob 1BTC" so you know what it's for.
Step 3) You send your BTC to that address.
Step 4) TweetTip confirms that it has received the amount with a tweet to you.
Step 5) TweetTip checks bob's recent tweets for a receiving address (as suggested).
Step 5a) If found, send BTC to that address. Tweet to bob that he got a tip from @you
Step 5b) If not found, tweet to bob he has Bitcoins waiting! Link to TweetTip.org/HowToGetYourTip
Step 5c) Periodically re-check bob's feed for receiving address up to a maximum time limit (90 days?)
Step 6) Profit ???


So ... is this possible with Twitter's available API? And if so, does that make the most sense?

The most complicated step is 2&3. If the official bitcoin client had bitcoin:// URI support that'd make things a bit easier. TweetTip could tweet "bitcoin://receivingaddress/btcamount" or whatever back and then it'd just be a matter of clicking and Accepting on the desktop client.

Anyway, thoughts? I'd be willing to take a stab at this if it sounds good to others.

EDIT: Or would this make more sense:

Step 1) Go to tweettip.org, type tiper's name, tipee's name, and amount.
Step 2) Send BTC to address that tweettip.org responds with.
Step 3) Once received and confirmed, TweetTip proceeds from Step 5 above.

Why shackle this into a tweet-driven communication protocol (requiring 4+ tweets per transaction) at all?

I suggest making a service completely independent of twitter, let's call it haveacoin.com or something (actually that's a pretty good domain, someone register it).

1. You go on haveacoin.com and say "I want to give 1 btc to @shazow" (or internets or carrots or whatever you want to call it). You can give your name if you want (let's pretend you're @stonetz).
2. It gives you a unique address to send your 1 btc, you do so and carry on.
3. I get a tweet saying "@shazow You have a fan! @stonetz sent you a bitcoin, collect it here! http://haveacoin.com/1234"
4. I go to the URL, it asks me to authenticate ownership of the @shazow account (via oauth).
5. This logs me in and I can withdraw the balance associated with the @shazow account by sending it to my wallet.

Once that's out and live, you can move on to email or Facebook or SMS or as many authentication sources as you can implement (I'm assuming it's obvious what the verification processes are for email/facebook/sms).

Now we have a Twitter-independent service that spans multiple communication mediums and doesn't require any fancy polling or stream monitoring. Win!

- shazow

Sounds good to me. Basically what I meant by my second suggestion (after the EDIT).

I'd personally still have the option of tweeting your receiving address (with some special syntax). Seems easier to me, although perhaps less secure? *shrugs*

I like the shazow idea, I also suggest to be able to edit the message and use a service like goo.gl for "http://haveacoin.com/1234" :)

I figured a good traditional tip is two cents, as in "your two cents worth", "my two cents worth" and so on.

That doesn't sit well with one cent transaction fees.

Thus the BitNickel (NKL) was born.

A large part of the reason my IRC bots support BitNickels is in order to implement a "$0.02 <nick>"  command in IRC to send 0.4 NKL to the specified nick. A BitNickel address is created for the specified nick and 0.4 NKL transferred to it.

The assumption is that BitNickels correspond to five "cents" in the context of "my two cents worth".

How much these so called "cents" actually trade for in a free market could of course vary, but by using BitNickels instead of BitCoins we get to only pay a transaction fee of 0.01 NKL instead of 0.01 BTC.

Extending this simple tipping system to other media than IRC does seem like a good idea, I just started with IRC due to not having handy ports people can connect to do implement various protocols with thus used IRC as a way to not need incoming ports to run services.

-MarkM-

Tipping is not the killer app IMO because there is nothing that Bitcoin does much better about tipping that other centralised tipping services don't arleady do. 

An addition:  Some kind of barcode or QR code that contains bitcoin addresses.  You can scan it with your phone, enter the amount, click send.  Viola!

I'm not sure how useful that would be in practice, but it sounds cool!  It would make in-person transactions easier though...

"Ok, next I have a capital A, followed by a lowercase z, then a capital M, capital V..."
vs.
"I brought a QR code printout.  Scan it and send me 5BTC plox."

Ok so there's a lot of discussion on this thread but is anyone actually tackling it? If not, I'll take it on. Sounds like a fun project.

Rage

Incidentally, YouTipIt has described their upcoming feature, "escrow" tips -- you'll be able to send a bitcoin tip to any Facebook user, regardless of whether or not they've registered with YouTipIt.
  http://enabledidler.blogspot.com/2011/05/youtipit-relaunch-thunderbirds-are-go.html (http://enabledidler.blogspot.com/2011/05/youtipit-relaunch-thunderbirds-are-go.html)

OK, I just registered haveacoin.com (can't believe no one got there first :)).  I'll make it available if anyone wants to use it -- just let me know.

I developed an experimental web service last year that inevitably was going to have support for virtual currency (tips).  I'm motivated to dust it off and move it forward now and probably limit the currency to bitcoin only... In an effort to support this movement.

http://ingesture.com/about/

Collaborators are welcome.

@sull

subscribed =)

Anyone close to having this finished yet?

I have implemented @PayBitBack (http://twitter.com/paybitback), the Bitcoin Tip Jar for Twitter. See http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=14707.0 for the announcement.

See my post on bitcoin URIs - it enables this. (sending BTC in tweets, email, SMS or from a webpage).

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45512.0