[ON HOLD - 300 BTC] Make a bitcointalk forum plugin to allow tipping via BTC

[evoorhees]

We've seen the awesomeness of the Reddit tipping bot. http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcointip/comments/13iykn/bitcointipdocumentation/

This concept needs to be made for forums as well. Let's start with BitcoinTalk.org.

I'm hereby offering a bounty of 300 btc to the person who:

A) makes such a system for BitcoinTalk
B) Gets it approved/integrated into this forum

This forum is built on the simplemachines platform... I assume a plugin for this site could then be applied to others?

The way you will win this bounty is by me tipping you in this forum for 300 btc when completed

Thoughts? Comments? Entrepreneurs?

[Blazr]

Does it need to be a plugin?

Could a bot be used instead? (which is what is being used on reddit ATM IIRC). This would have the added advantage of not needing to be approved.

[evoorhees]

Does it need to be a plugin?

Could a bot be used instead? (which is what is being used on reddit ATM IIRC). This would have the added advantage of not needing to be approved.

Ummm I think that's fine... honestly I'm not smart enough to know how it works technically. If I can tip you the prize via this forum though, then it's valid.

In fact I think if the bot doesn't need to be plugged in/approved by the forum owner, it'd be even more awesome

[Blazr]

If this was made as an SMF plugin, it would need to be applied by Theymos, but, more importantly, BTCTalk would have to host the wallet file. It would also have a much nicer interface than if it was made into a bot.

If this was made a bot, what would happen is the bot would have its own account on the forums which it logs into, and users could send commands via pm (for balance checking, depositing, withdrawing) and also tip people by posting +bitcointip <username> <amount> in a thread, like how the reddit bot works. The bot & wallet could be hosted elsewhere & could work without specifically needing permission from Theymos (unless he bans the account of course). This is how reddit tip works.

Would you be prepared to host the bot?

I could make this easily enough either way, and could host the bot myself if need be, but just want to make sure we do this the right way.

[evoorhees]

I'd like Theymos to be part of the discussion. Will PM him now and have him comment.

[gweedo]

Someone would probably want it to be python (best web scrapping libraries) since there is no api, and you have to do a lot of scrapping, but I think if someone was to make a tipping bot they would have to clear it with theymos first. Since this bot would use a lot of bandwidth and could be confused for a DDOS attack.

[theymos]

I've thought about this before as a forum feature. It would be kind of cool, but I haven't done it for these reasons:
- I predict that people won't use the feature very much. Donation addresses in signatures rarely receive much BTC. (Reddit's bitcointip will eventually lose popularity, I think.)
- If the donation amount is displayed, something needs to prevent people from inflating the number by donating to themselves.
- Running a Bitcoin client requires quite a bit of work to make sure the client is updated, it doesn't die, most of the BTC is held in cold storage, etc.
- I don't want anyone to use the forum as an E-Wallet. That's not the forum's purpose, and there might be legal risks associated with doing this.

Bots can't be posting in threads because such posts would be off-topic. Any posts by humans consisting entirely of bot commands would also be off-topic. Bots can use PMs as long as PM recipients have some way of unsubscribing from all of the bot's PMs.

I've been thinking about creating a forum API to make it easier to create bots, collect stats, etc. I need to think carefully about how best to do this, since I want the interface to stay the same when the forum moves away from SMF.

[mskwik]

Someone would probably want it to be python (best web scrapping libraries) since there is no api, and you have to do a lot of scrapping, but I think if someone was to make a tipping bot they would have to clear it with theymos first. Since this bot would use a lot of bandwidth and could be confused for a DDOS attack.

Wouldn't necessarily have to be too bad, use a little logo/emote as part of the tip command and it could zero in on just the pages it needs to check.  Would have to think through the details but with a well-crafted javascript bookmarklet you may even be able to sign an image url and have the tipping bot work almost completely passively from the image hits.  (And if you figure out how the recipient gets specified/detected it could potentially work on any page anywhere)

[gweedo]

Someone would probably want it to be python (best web scrapping libraries) since there is no api, and you have to do a lot of scrapping, but I think if someone was to make a tipping bot they would have to clear it with theymos first. Since this bot would use a lot of bandwidth and could be confused for a DDOS attack.

Wouldn't necessarily have to be too bad, use a little logo/emote as part of the tip command and it could zero in on just the pages it needs to check.  Would have to think through the details but with a well-crafted javascript bookmarklet you may even be able to sign an image url and have the tipping bot work almost completely passively from the image hits.  (And if you figure out how the recipient gets specified/detected it could potentially work on any page anywhere)

Kinda building off your idea, I mean this would be a lot of work for the user, but you could in theory make a chrome extension that uses JSON RPC and everyone that installs the extension would be forced to supply a bitcoin address that would be saved to a website/database. Then when your on a thread page, it would gather all the usernames and check to see if they are in the database, and if they are display a button that you can click to quickly donate, it would be a lot of work but could be a solution.

[evoorhees]

Theymos - I'll add 100btc to bounty, payable to you, if you help make this happen.

I'm not a programmer, so how else can I help move this along? Theymos - are you in?

[theymos]

How can I turn down 100 BTC?

I'm thinking of an end result something like this:

The first number after "Tip me" is the amount of BTC received for that post (perhaps in bitcents), and the second number is the total amount of BTC that user has received.

I thought about it more and I've decided that I definitely don't want the forum to be an E-Wallet in any way, and a tipping service definitely needs to be an E-Wallet at some level because Bitcoin isn't good for microtransactions. So the tipping stuff needs to be done by a third-party service.

The "tip me" link in the screenshot above will be like:
https://tippingService.com/tip/userID/postID
At that page, users of tippingService.com can send a tip for the specified post. tippingService.com might then alert the recipient via forum PM or email.

The forum will periodically download tip totals for postIDs.

The service should probably charge a fee for every transaction so that people can't endlessly inflate their tip numbers.

[gweedo]

The only time the wallet would have to be hot would be for a withdrawal and that could be done every hour only on the backend so it isn't that hot. If you set up a minium amount for withdrawal or move the fee to the withdrawal that would make so people keep there coins in the site longer as well. You could also set a maximum so people can't use it as an e-wallet, but I understand it would just be one more stressful things for you to handle.

[Tachikoma]

I'm interested to see what I can do. I am confident I could build a tipping backend system, https://tippingService.com, as mentioned by Theymos with a tipping API. I'm just not sure I want the responsibility of handling wallets that might end up with a lot of coins that are not mine.

I will see if others are interested in building this as well cause I'm not going to 'risk' working on this and see somebody else snatch up the bounty before I complete the work  

[MPOE-PR]

- Running a Bitcoin client requires quite a bit of work to make sure the client is updated, it doesn't die, most of the BTC is held in cold storage, etc.
- I don't want anyone to use the forum as an E-Wallet. That's not the forum's purpose, and there might be legal risks associated with doing this.

These sound pretty solid.

On the other hand, anyone who wants to be tipped in BTC can put an address in their sigline. Why is there a need for more software?

Vaguely related, how's the new forum software coming along?

[TheButterZone]

- Running a Bitcoin client requires quite a bit of work to make sure the client is updated, it doesn't die, most of the BTC is held in cold storage, etc.
- I don't want anyone to use the forum as an E-Wallet. That's not the forum's purpose, and there might be legal risks associated with doing this.

These sound pretty solid.

On the other hand, anyone who wants to be tipped in BTC can put an address in their sigline.

As you can see, I stuck it under my avatar as personal text, so sig & avatar hiding doesn't work. Even though it's longer than the table column, double clicking it selects the obscured part.

[Mike Hearn]

Why would the forum need to host wallets?

Users could just provide the forum software with some public keys and have a consistent way to format bitcoin: URIs. I can imagine an integration with the payment protocol in future to produce signed payment requests. But the money goes directly from tipper to tipee and the forum itself never touches the money. It means to pay a tip is 2 clicks instead of 1 (click the link to open your wallet program, click approve), but once the payment protocol starts rolling out wallet software could be instructed to auto-approve small payments that are signed by the forum.

If you wanted, you could have the forum monitor the block chain and when you see an address be used, switch to the next for better privacy.

I disagree that bitcoin can't handle micropayments, by the way, for the sorts of sizes and frequencies that tippers would consider it should work fine. But in the odd case where it wouldn't, wallets could simply delay the payment until another larger transaction was made and tack it onto that one.

That said, I agree with Theymos on people using it - it's probably better to wait and see if the redditbot has longevity. If it does, analyzing what made it successful where other attempts failed would be useful, then we know exactly what to recreate. For instance, is it convenience? Immediacy? The ability to show off your charity by requiring tip commands to be public?

[evoorhees]

I think an important feature of the reddit and twitter tipping bots is this: they allow you to tip people who haven't done anything special.

In other words, the recipient doesn't need to have set up a tipping account, or advertised his address anywhere. On reddit you can just send a tip to someone who has never heard of btc, and that's the beauty of it.

So, this potential forum system, probably requires this. This is also why the practice of people putting their btc address in their sig is not equivalent. I want to be able to tip someone who has never solicited it.

I agree the forum shouldn't fuss with building an ewallet to hold the funds for this. Instead, it could use an API to a secure wallet system, like Coinapult.com 

Idea:

1) I like a comment Theymos made, so I click the "Tip User" link (maybe similar to how theymos showed in his screenshot)
2) A window pops up, with a BTC address and QR code
3) Upon receipt of btc to that address, the forum emails the user (via coinapult.com api) his donated coins.
4) User claims the coins at his leisure

With this system, the user's email address is never exposed to the public. And, the user never needs to enter a BTC address into his profile. And, the forum doesn't need to host any wallets or store funds at all.

Thoughts?

[CIYAM]

I wouldn't be promoting Coinapult for this - there is no user support for that service (I only got my 1 BTC back becuase Yankee was nice enough to do so).

[paraipan]

We had this bounty on Rugatu for a while (asked 30 Sep), people are already working on it but it gathered around 6btc only.

http://www.rugatu.com/questions/3575/can-you-make-a-bitcoin-smf-mod

[Tachikoma]

I wouldn't be promoting Coinapult for this - there is no user support for that service (I only got my 1 BTC back becuase Yankee was nice enough to do so).

Are there any other services that will host a wallet in a secure and safe fashion for you?