Bitcoin Forum

What do you think about the idea of adding a button to give a member an amount of bitcoin as a way to thank someone for a helpful post? this will also incentive higher quality posts along with the merit system to rank higher.

Maybe it's not viable now, but thanks to payment channels, I envision a future in which one can click a post and donate an small amount through LN. You would post your channel in your profile and the forum would automatically route the donation through it. Donations and amounts will be shown just like the merit amounts. This will be another way to stimulate the bitcoin economy and help LN adoption.

Do you love it? do you hate it? and why.

Donation buttons work best when a group of people don't have a way to easily send money to each other.

Bitcoin already has that built in.  :)

I know but the point would be to integrate it within the forum's software, so people could see how much money a post got (and optionally hide it if you don't want to show it) and just make it easier than having to go into someone's profile, copy and paste their address and so on. Most people get lazy and decide not to donate if it's more than 1 click.

In all payment-channel systems, including LN, the recipient has to be online to receive a payment. AFAIK the only way to receive a payment while offline would be to have someone else accept the payment on your behalf, absolutely trusting them with the BTC, at least until they can forward it to you. For this reason, LN isn't great for forum transactions, where you usually can't expect the recipient to be online.

Didn't know that. It's rather disappointing... I thought that the transaction would be on hold until either you receive it by going online or the sender closes it.

In any case, how about having a "bitcointalk.org" hub in which people deposit their donations and then you can redeem them into your channel in the forum by login in your account or something... kind of centralized but since it would be small amounts donated it wouldn't be that big of a deal, also there wouldn't be no KYC stuff involved. Im sure there is a cool way to implement this in the forum software in the future.

While I think this would be a nice thing to have, I think it would wind up being more of a novelty than anything else.

Good quality posters can already be rewarded by getting to participate in the best bitcoin only signature campaigns.

Sounds like you’re describing https://steemit.com

bitcointalk.org will never hold people's money like that, even temporarily. Perhaps someone else could set up such a hub, though it's really sub-optimal. For now, on-chain fees are low enough that on-chain transactions are probably better, though fees will eventually rise again; hopefully by then some new tech will have either improved LN in this area or provided a good alternative to LN for these use-cases.

Assuming you and I have an open LN channel, we will need to exchange a total of 6(iirc) partially (each by one party) transactions in a very specific order. It is more complex if a transaction needs to be routed through other LN nodes.

Having an on site balance feature to tip people is simply a horrific idea. For starters keeping aside the whole Doge Coin Tip bot fiasco that broke down around a year ago (a repeat of which I doubt will happen since the owners to put it simply were foolish investors or thieves whichever you may take it to be. The administration here doesn't seem to fall in either category

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Issues

• For starters the biggest issue would be the fact that people would start using the onsite tip function as a wallet instead of well what it should be, a tip function. Given this site also has a marketplace section people will end up doing trades with on site balances (this pretty much has become the norm in most places that do have a tipping feature). Holding huge numbers would be rather risky for both parties
• Time wasted on a non essential feature. From what I understand the "New Forum" is in development since ages and people would much rather have that instead of a tip function which won't see much use (merits are free and yet it's rarely given, not to mention merits giving on forum rank boosts has lead to people exchanging it for personal gains which has artificial pumped the stats on how many merits are given).

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Proposal

Add a donation button linked to your bitcoin address. As in the button can be shown at the bottom of your post or near your profile but all it does is just open your bitcoin address as a link like:


Which pretty much serves the same purpose as what Theymos suggested AKA just use the chain to donate. This will just make stuff simpler than going to the profile and from atleast what it seems to me will be much simpler to implement