I'm pleased to announce the beta release of http://www.btctip.com, a service that allows you to send any Twitter user bitcoins with a tweet.

You can log in to the website with your Twitter account, no other sign up necessary. Through the site interface, you can see your account history, and withdraw and deposit bitcoins.

Green address deposits

Currently you can deposit from a MtGox green address to have your deposit registered with zero-confirmations, in about 30 seconds. Non-green-address deposits take three confirmations, or about 30 minutes, to be registered by the site.

Sending bitcoins

The format for sending bitcoins is:

#btctip [recipient] [amount] [unit]

For example:

#btctip @BobOnTwitter 10 centcoins

The permitted units are bitcoins, centcoins (0.01 BTC), and millicoins (0.001 BTC).

The variations and aliases of each that are recognized by btctip.com are:

bitcoin: bitcoin(s) and btc

centcoin: centcoin(s), bitcent(s), cbtc, and internet(s)

millicoin: millicoin(s), millibit(s), mbtc, and woolong(s)

Note that , (comma) is treated the same as . (decimal mark), so for example, 10,2 bitcents will be interpreted as 10.2 bitcents.

Your tweet can contain other text as well, as long as some segment of it contains the tipping command.

For example, this would be valid:

Great post! #btctip @BobOnTwitter 10 centcoins!

After btctip.com has registered your tweet, the Twitter account @btctip will post a tweet verifying the transaction, in the following format:

@Recipient, you received a [Amount] BTC tip from @Sender! Log in with Twitter to btctip.com to claim your bitcoin!

Unclaimed tips

If the tip recipient doesn't become a BTCTip user (which happens automatically when they log in) within 5 days of the tip being sent, then the tip will be returned to you. If they are already BTCTip users, their tip is considered claimed whether they log in or not.

1 day before the tip is returned, @btctip will post a tweet alerting the tip recipient that they have 1 more day to log in before their tip is returned.

Inspiration

I got the idea for the site in this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5382.0

The site is very new and has had very little testing in a live environment, so please don't store more than small amounts of bitcoin on it.

If you have any questions send me a PM or post it here.

Tip for sending: Occasionally a #btctip command will fail to be read by the BTCTip bot and will not illicit a tip transaction through btctip.com. To maximize the chances of your tip command working, we advise you make the tweet containing the #btctip command a normal tweet rather than a reply tweet. This is because the BTCTip bot scans through Twitter's search results stream to find a tweet containing a #btctip command, and reply tweets show up in Twitter's search results less reliably than normal tweets

Happy Tweeting

Updates:

**May 5th 2012** Added 'unclaimed tips' section

**December 23rd 2012** Added 'internet(s)' as an alias of the 'bitcent' unit, and 'woolong(s)' as an alias of the 'millibit' unit, and added note recommending tips be regular tweets rather than reply tweets

**May 16th 2013** Added 'centcoin(s)' as an alias for 'bitcent' and 'millicoin(s)' as an alias for 'millibit'. These new aliases are featured as the primary ways to refer to the cBTC and mBTC denominations, respectively, on btctip.com.

A new BTCTip Tweet Box has been released, that website owners can customize on http://btctip.com and embed in their websites to receive BTC microdonations. It's been set up on http://kianoo.com as a test case.

**May 22nd 2013** Reduced minimum tip amount from 1 centcoin (1 cBTC) to 1 millicoin (1 mBTC).

Glad you like the idea!


Good question. These were probably the default permissions. I'll ask the guy who developed the site for me if we can eliminate:

"See who you follow, and follow new people.
Update your profile.
Post Tweets for you."

As I see no need for them.

That site appears to have been launched in a fire-and-forget manner. Ease of use has to be part of the solution and from their intro thread, I didn't see much promise. Just because an idea is cool and potentially beneficial for its users doesn't mean people will seek it out. That does bring up a couple other good questions though.

Amincd, how do you plan to keep the lights on(i.e. make enough to be sustainable) for this service?

Have thought about what you're going to do for marketing (outside this forum post/reddit)?

From what I understand, paybitback allows any one to create a bitcoin address for any one else on Twitter, that the latter can 'claim' by posting their bitcoin address in a tweet to @paybitback.

Btctip is different in that you don't need to publicize your bitcoin address to withdraw the tips you receive, which protects your privacy, and all tips are publicized in tweets, which helps promote both bitcoin and the #btctip service.


My current plan is to sell advertising space on the site once it has enough to traffic to be worth the trouble. I imagine the ad space would be particularly attractive for bitcoin exchanges and merchants, as the site, if popular, will have a lot of visitors who will be receiving bitcoins for the first time and would want to sell/spend them.


No, I haven't thought about that yet. I've been mostly betting on word of mouth. *Edit, although that's a good point, I should start thinking about other advertising channels, perhaps a 'promoted' tweet would be a good idea

Any update on the permissions?

In what I could find ( https://dev.twitter.com/docs/application-permission-model ), you probably have the minimum permissions that Twitter will let you have and still be able to send tweets on behalf of your users.

Yes, it's being fixed, but it requires re-writing some code as we need the site's status-posting function to use a separate Twitter application from the site users so that we can post tweets, while regular accounts aren't required to grant status-posting permissions to the site. Right now the whole site uses one Twitter application.



Thanks for the words of encouragement.

Cool.

UPDATE:

The permissions have been changed so that the application can no longer:

Update your profile.
Post Tweets for you.

Looking forward to your feedback.

Weex, if you give me your Twitter account name, I'd like to send you 1 BTC for finding the permission problem. If you'd prefer to be sent the coin directly just pm me your bitcoin address.

Thanks, I got it. Will be looking to tip others when appropriate.

Edit: One issue I see is that I had literally no indication that I have been tipped. Twitter sends emails when one gets a direct message so perhaps that is why you would want to use DMs. Otherwise, someone would have to have some sort of alert setup on their account or login regularly and look through all their newest "Interactions".

Cool 

I'm a bit confused. Just saw this:


who's tipping who here?

I tipped @jonmatonis, and then he retweeted my tip tweet. He can't tip himself so it's safe to do.


BTCTIP posted:


Do you have any BTC in your btctip account?

In any case, tips have to be at least 1 bitcent (10 millibits), so that wouldn't have worked.

*Edit, sorry, there seems to be a bug in btctip's reading of the "mBTC" variation of the millibit unit. It's reading it as "BTC". Please try using 'millibits' until this is fixed.

thanks, awesome. thanks for the generous tip, too.

I finally managed to tip someone (stacyherbert).

I think this is a great way to "infect" people.

now what happens if I send a tweet to two people like


what would happen? does the "#btctip" have to be directly after the @[user]?

Hey amincd,

One question is what happens if someone doesn't claim their tips? It might be good to display a message or list of past tips that are past some number of days and haven't been claimed (where claiming means logging in once since they were sent). Then it would be up to the tipper to ping the recipient again or you could offer a way to reclaim them.

-weex

I'm pleased to announce that at 6:00 PM PST today, btctip.com will be implementing a new feature which returns unclaimed tips after 30 days to the tip sender.

What this means is that if you send a tip to another Twitter user, and they don't become a BTCTip user (which happens automatically when they log in) within 30 days of the tip being sent, then the tip will be returned to you. If they are already BTCTip users, their tip is considered claimed whether they log in or not.

10 days before the tip is returned, @btctip will post a tweet alerting the tip recipient that they have 10 more days to log in before their tip is returned.

Please note, if you have received a tip 30 or more days ago through BTCTip, and have not yet become a BTCTip member, the tip will be returned to the tipper, effective 6:00 PM PST.

This is a great idea. I'm going to look into it more closely.

Just wanted to let people know that I got some of my tips back after 1 month since the recipient didn't claim it. amincd, you still working on this?

There's another thread for BTCTip and I just suggested the feature to address that:

There's a problem where if I'm retweeting, that doesn't mean I want to send payment too!

Here using @BitcoinNews I clicked the Retweet:
 - https://twitter.com/bitcoinmoney/status/218756094795857920

And BTCTip interpreted that as a request to tip.
 - https://twitter.com/btctip/status/218756622057619460

If I had sufficient funds in that account, they would have been taken and sent out as a tip.

That's probably not desired behavior. I believe the Twitter API allows you to know that what you saw is a native retweet and for BTCTip to ignore those.

You're right, this is not a desired behavior. Thanks for the tip regarding the Twitter API and retweets, I'll look into it.


Noted..

I think it's a great idea, but it might only be easy enough to integrate if an API is built for BTCTip that could notify third party sites like yours of payment receipts as well as the product #.

Hm ... another one that didn't get send out, and it wasn't an @reply -- but did have two @names in the tweet:

 - https://twitter.com/bitcoinmoney/status/240252850570133504

Try adding a dot in the first place when replying to a tweet. This way Twitter treat the reply as a normal tweet and let everyone read it (so BTCtip could).

Have deposited into my BTCtip account, 2 confirmations and the balance grew up.

Sent 1 twit... Confirmation in minutes!

Sent another 7 hours ago (a few minutes after the first one)... no response.

Sent again 1 hour ago the twit with a little change in text (Twitter didn't let me just twit again the same)... no response.


Conclusion: #btctip command and search is not working properly (Twitter's search for # never has). What about this:

Mention + Command?

@btctip #btctip @exampleuser 0.10 BTC

And look at Mentions (which work better than search #), ignore @btctip mention in twit and run the command #btctip.


Could it be possible? Isn't that a better way? I can't imaging Erik Voorhees (or ME!) sending hundreds of #btctips and then all of his recipients not receiving their tips... Would be harmful for the BTCtip service.

This sounds good and maybe would work better.


As I said I tested the service with one very first twit and worked, but I won't use it again after sending a twit twice (with a +7 hours gap) and never getting the confirmation.


BTW what about using Tweetbot / Twitter for iPhone / Tweetdeck... I know this doesn't mean anything, but would it affect the way the twit is written? I checked the #btctip search results and the failed twit appeared there for hours but never received the @btctip confirmation.

Well a few hours ago I tried again cuz I feltl I should after you quick response here in the forum. It worked! The. Tried again with the same priblematic account which failed twice and WORKED TOO! Have just sent two more and have been confirmed in seconds...

Maybe all the problem was lag in the Twitter search results so that affected the crawl. But I can now confirm that BTCTIP is really fast to confirm. Let's see if recipients know what to do then

(Still thinking about the mentions method as a better way, no search results problems).

Is there any way to know when a tip has been claimed? Displaying that information on the "Recent activity" table would be awesome.

The tip is eventually returned if it is not claimed, so that's one way of knowing.   I don't know how much time lapses before this occurs though ... pretty short (i.e., couple of days) if I remember correctly.

I'm pleased to announce a fix to a minor bug: you can now re-tweet other people's #btctip tweets without it triggering a transaction from your BTCTip account.

I'd like to thank Stephen Gornick for pushing me to look at the Twitter API and fix this.

Does anybody know what happened to this service?  Have they absconded with our coins that were on btctip accounts?  I only had about 0.1 BTC there, but that's $5 these days!

I had slightly more BTC there and corresponded with amincd a number of times. amincd, what happened? Do you have an ETA on the site being back up?

Thanks for coming back and saving the service!

The site is down from where I am...

when attempting to visit http://btctip.com/ it hangs for a while and then redirects me to an address like https://secure.btctip.com:9000/ but it still does not work, and eventually goes to the standard 'page cannot be displayed' screen on chrome.

Shame because I was looking forward to a look around. Ill check back later 

It is working now... will have a look around soon!.

I'm happy to announce that BTCTip is operational again.

A few changes have been made to the site since it was last running: 'centcoin(s)' has been added as an alias for cBTC and 'millicoin(s)' has been added as an alias for mBTC. In fact, these two new aliases are featured on btctip.com as the primary way to refer to their respective denominations.

Also, I'm happy to introduce a new BTCTip Tweet Box, that website owners can embed in their websites to receive BTC microdonations. The tweet box can be customized for your website on http://btctip.com.

Some advantages to embedding a BTCTip Tweet Box are:

• When people donate, it also advertises your site on Twitter via a status update.
• Your donors can receive public credit for their donations, as it's done in a publicly verifiable way.
• It promotes BTC as an internet microdonation currency

I've set it up on http://kianoo.com, one of my websites, as a test example.

Please let me know if you have any problems with it.

Important: if you have a BTCTip account, you will need to log in at least once with your Twitter account to re-connect it with your BTCTip account before you can send tips using the BTC in your BTCTip account. This is a result of an upgrade to a new Drupal Twitter module.

Edit I just found out the site is not accessible for non-local connections. Sorry about that, I'm trying to fix it now.

cant access it...still

finally, thanks for your work. just in time!

Update:

Roseanne favorited a tweet from @btctip:

https://twitter.com/btctip/status/340730373447241729

Thank you very much for your feedback and for the notice about the radio show you'll be doing. I would of course appreciate any mention of my service.

Regarding hosted wallets, you're right to be concerned about storing bitcoin on them, particularly, if like BTCTip, they don't store private keys as encrypted files. Regarding QR codes, that's a good suggestion, I'll look into adding it.

BTCTip doesn't encrypt private keys. Some e-wallets, like blockchain.info, serve code that generates the private-key, encrypts it, and decrypts it, client-side, which means the server never sees the unencrypted private key. These e-wallets are more secure than one like BTCTip.

Yes that's correct.


I don't have enough BTC on my server to make cold-storage worthwhile. I have no interest in losing BTC on purpose, but I clearly state on the site that it shouldn't be trusted to store more than small amounts of BTC.

No it doesn't use cold storage and there aren't thousands of dollars of bitcoin on my server. The guy tipping thousands of dollars was using the Reddit tipping service, which is different from mine. You're right to be concerned and not trust your money on my site if security is a major concern.

Hargnah! This is a service and it's planning to run with the money, preparing the excuse if they don't take precautions to not have more money on the server than they need to run business for a day or two.
Any hosted wallet - and btctip is a hosted wallet - has to make sure there is only a fraction of the money on the server at any given time. Anything else is just not serious.

I programmed a Facebook-"Tipping"-Wallet but didn't bring it public, because you have to take security precautions I was not ready to take. Bringing it life and loosing just one BTC would be just one more of these Bitcoin scammers Bitcoin is full of. I would feel obliged to replace any single coin lost to a hack or data loss and so should you. Thanks to plausible deniability, you running with the money is indistinguishable from you getting hacked and thus risking to get hacked equals to preparing to run with the money.

tbctip is designed to store moderate amounts of money to tip small amounts of money to many people of which some might end up receiving considerable amounts of money. The senders will have money to tip from for weeks as they don't want to charge it twice a day and the receivers might delay thinking about how to withdraw this strange … what was its name again? … money to some day in the future and will take action only when they can't sleep well at night knowing there is a fortune on some obscure server. Not taking aforementioned security precautions means the operator not only does not care about his users loosing their money but also that he almost begs the hackers to come to his server.

Edit: You made it on my signature.

Told you so.

Running this service for two years without a cold storage strategy is the profile of a scammer. If you intend to buy from him, make sure to get his real identity and better make sure the compensation of his victims works out as you are buying a huge liability. Your customers will go after you if you can't identify the former owner of the service beyond any doubt with. 

Ok, look, so you only accumulated 14BTC and from the start told your users that you will not take responsability for the money you collected from them.
You refused to take the bare minimum of security measures which is cold storage. If you have any stats, you will notice that never ever did your bot need to touch more than 10% of its respective peak funds, so sending 90% to cold storage is not only a trivial change of 3 lines of code, it is therefore also an obligation to any bitcoin business like yours.

If your users don't get compensated, you did more harm than good as all those who got messages reading "you received money" actually did not receive money at all. How many are affected?

I still find it shocking how you can take it so lightly stealing $8800US from thousands of people.

Your claim that you were obviously not involved in the event you call a hack due to 14BTC not being worth all the hassle you went through is also quite halfhearted. Maybe you are just a stupid scammer who failed to do what pirateat40 did? But the pattern is the same: influx - withdraws = 0 -> cash out. I find it likely that your balance stalled around now, as a price rally usually is where people care about their bitcoins and might bother moving them out.

I don't have any proof of this and basically only play advocatus diaboli but if I had lost BTC to you I would go after you.

Whatever you say. I guess I made my point and as I have not lost anything to your failure I will leave it to others to sue you.

Edit: I programmed a sloppy facebook tipping bot and did not bring it live because I neither would have taken the responsibility to secure shit and would definitely have gotten hacked. Assuming you did not profit from that hack, maybe we still both did it wrong and the solution would have been to release it as open source and have it have taken care of by some bigger player that knows both how to secure a server and how to implement cold storage.

Regarding the "3 lines change": Instead of having sendBitcoin() you would have try-catch and for the case of insufficien funds, you would have an error message "please be patient while my master refills the hot wallet"; mailMaster(). The other change would be to query your database for sum(balance) and compare it to what bitcoind reports as total balance and eventually send extra funds home to master. Sure it would not be 3 lines but most likely less than 20 or less than a day of work. I guess you will have more work with the lost funds than that. Refunding the hot wallet would be a trivial job until that day you actually get hacked and have to refill twice in one hour.