Introducing Bitthanks - beta

[niekie]

http://niekie.com/bitthanks-small.png

Another interesting use for Bitcoin is the ability to quickly send a token of your appreciation for help received or small services provided to someone, especially in forum environments.

To aid with that, I've created Bitthanks. Bitthanks is a system which displays a public donation count in a forum signature, and displays a small banner soliciting a donation. The system generates an unique address labeled with the receiving user's label for each possible donator.

Once transactions clear, a cronjob takes care of automated deposit to the legitimate beneficiary's address registered with Bitthanks.

Currently, this system is in beta. To sign up for beta testing, private message me on this forum with:

• An address I can send the Bitcoins you receive to. Generate one in your client, and label it something like "Bitthanks Automated Deposit"
• Your e-mail address, in case I need to contact you for some reason.
• UPDATE: Future-proofing: a password, which might be required for a future web-interface for manual deposits.
• (optional) An alternate message, which you want displayed instead of "Want to thank me for this forum post? Click here! Powered by Bitthanks."

You'll receive a message back with the proper BBcode to place in your forum signature.

Enjoy!

[HostFat]

Beautiful
I have just sent you 5 bitcoins to test it

EDIT:
Anyway, this is a good service that anyone could have local installed.
I could be a bitcoin plug-in or a like.

[laszlo]

Thanks!

[HostFat]

your idea reminds me flattr.com
It will be very interesting if you make it simple / easy and fast as flattr.

Just a "click", and the bitcoin client will share a small amount of bcoins

[niekie]

Flattr definitely sounds like an interesting model. Currently, to do that with Bitcoins though I'd have to get both the user and the benificiary to register. As far as doing any integration in the Bitcoin client, I'm afraid I don't know C(++).

The code to do this locally would be pretty simple. All that's needed is a JSON-RPC API call to getnewaddress with as argument a label you want the donations to apply to, and a call to getreceivedbylabel for checking the amount of donations sent. Furthermore, you'll need to use a graphics library to generate the image. I am using GD along with PHP. For JSON-RPC I use http://jsonrpcphp.org/. You'll of course need to install bitcoin on your webserver currently, which may not be possible on shared hosting.

[sirius]

Cool idea. With some additions to the Bitcoin api, your service could show the received amount for any address in the block chain and people could send their donations directly to the recipient.

[HostFat]

I think that bitcoin-url will also give some help to this

[niekie]

And... Bitthanks now has a logo

[martin]

Hi nieke, I sent you a private message about getting a bitthanks link but you never replied, any chance of still getting one?

[mizerydearia]

nieke - Do you have any plans to release the code you used to make Bitthanks possible so that others can implement it for themselves or as other providers providing same type of service to others as well?

Here's some code that does something similar:

Code:

<?
	$font = "/usr/share/fonts/ttf-bitstream-vera/Vera.ttf";
	require_once 'jsonRPCClient.php';
	$data=new jsonRPCClient('http://127.0.0.1:8332');
	$donated = $data->getreceivedbylabel("Bitcoin Forum Sig");

	if (substr($_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"], 0, 27) == "http://bitcointalk.org/") {
		$text = "Received amount in Bitcoins: $donated. Want to thank me for this forum post? Click here!";
		header("Content-type: image/png");
		$fontsize = 12;
		$bounds = array();
		$bounds = ImageTTFBBox($fontsize, 0, $font, "W"); $oy = abs($bounds[7]-$bounds[1]);
		$bounds = ImageTTFBBox($fontsize, 0, $font, $text);
		$w = abs($bounds[4]-$bounds[6]);
		$h = abs($bounds[7]-$bounds[1]);
		$image = imagecreatetruecolor($w,$h);
		imagefill($image, 0, 0, imagecolorallocatealpha($image, 255, 255, 255, 127));
		imagesavealpha($image, true);
		ImageTTFText($image, $fontsize, 0, 0, $oy, imagecolorallocate($image, 0, 0, 0), $font, $text);
		imagePNG($image);
	}
	else {
		$address = $data->getnewaddress("Bitcoin Forum Sig");
		echo "Hello! You've reached the donation page for accepting donations :)<br>";
		echo "<br>";
		echo "This user accepts Bitcoin donations at the following address: $address<br>";
		echo "<br>";
		echo "Number of Bitcoins received for this user: $donated.";
	}
?>

[Insti]

Is bitthanks still active?

I've noticed the image has disappeared from my signature, and I've not noticed them in anyone else's lately..

[niekie]

Is bitthanks still active?

I've noticed the image has disappeared from my signature, and I've not noticed them in anyone else's lately..

Currently? No. I've had to reinstall a lot of stuff due to temporary issues on my server.

I should be able to get it up and in working order again soon though. All signatures should then start working again. Sorry for suddenly disappearing without notice

As for plans to release the source code... yes, I'll definitely be looking at doing that some point in the future, though I'd like to fix some small issues first though.