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

[CIYAM]

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

Am not sure how much I would trust any online wallet but I will say that the support from WalletBit is quite good (there you go Kris - something positive from me at last).

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[Tachikoma]

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

Am not sure how much I would trust any online wallet but I will say that the support from WalletBit is quite good (there you go Kris - something positive from me at last).

This looks better but still a little too much. The ideal situation would be a service where you would simply get json-rpc details to a hosted bitcoind instance where the third party ensures security for the hosting. Does that exist?

[CIYAM]

Actually am working on something similar (in terms of escrow) for my own project - if it turns out to be useful then will be sure to let others know (not promoting any particular service at this stage though).

[Mike Hearn]

So what happens on reddit if the user never picks up the coins?

It's better to think in terms of purely decentralized solutions rather than relying on branded third party services. Otherwise you're not really addressing theymos' concerns, just moving them around to some other party.

So I'd start by extending the payment protocol (er, once we ship v1) to be able to mark payments as donations. A donation is processed like a regular payment but the output is not marked as spent in the wallet, it's marked as donated instead. Donated payments can be deliberately double-spent after the user clicks through a confirmation screen. This means if the user doesn't pick up the tip and eventually the tipper gets bored and wants his money back, they can do that easily from within their wallet software.

The Payment message would then be extended to contain not only transactions, but also a list of private keys that can correspond to the tx outputs. The client would submit the Payment as normal to a URL on bitcointalk.org which would simply take the submitted data, and send it as an attachment in a mail to the user. Then the forum would forget all about it. Anyone with access to the file can claim the tip, but it'll end up in the users mailbox and nowhere else.

Advantages:

• If the forum gets hacked, only newly sent tips can be intercepted and stolen. It'd be easy to set up a bot which tips itself every so often to detect tips that go missing.
• The forum is not holding money for anyone, just routing some messages around, so there's no additional legal complexity.
• Tips are pure P2P, as fits Bitcoins design
• It's a system that's trivial to integrate with any forum, blog, wiki, whatever. As long as the software can accept an HTTP POST and send the attached data to the user via email, you're done.

To go a step further for users who get tipped and want to auto-accept tips in future, with a more complex plugin they can provide the forum with some addresses and the forum can automatically spend the submitted tips to the user themselves. That way they don't have to open the mail attachments.

[cedivad]

From what i understood this relies on someone else services, and there is no easy way to skip this.
Decentralizing this external entity doesn't help on his security.

I would love the 300BTC but even given that i create this service using my infrastructure, how could you relay on me with your money? The only answer is that you couldn't.

[mskwik]

This is where that mythical decentralized reputation/identity system would be useful.  I see that bitcoin-otc identities already (at least many of them) have bitcoin addresses associated with them so tipping based on otc usernames would be trivial.  Is there anywhere that is linking forum names and otc names together already (decentralized or not)?  Of course that still requires setting up another account to receive tips and/or holding unclaimed tips somewhere temporarily for users without an account.

[theymos]

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?

IMO an E-Wallet is desirable for this because:
- People can instantly make very small tips without having to pay a large fee (relative to the tip amount). They could even send amounts smaller than 1 satoshi.
- People are more likely to keep any tips they receive in the system if withdrawing their BTC requires a higher fee and more time than sending tips does.
- I think that the best way to prevent people from infinitely inflating their "tips received" count is to charge a percentage fee based on the BTC amount sent. You could do this with Bitcoin transaction fees, but it's more complicated for the sender.

The exact requirements clearly need to be figured out before someone starts working on this.

[Mike Hearn]

Agreed about requirements, but why would you ever want to tip somebody less than 1 satoshi? That level of value is in the extreme-micropayment range, if I got a 1 satoshi tip I'd take it as an insult!

Do tips really need to double as a reputation system? The goal is to encourage posters to post more, right, not act as a publicly visible measure of reliability. If you just don't display the total amount of tips gathered by a user, or just show a list of usernames that pressed the tip button on a post, then the issue of tipping yourself goes away.

[d'aniel]

IMO an E-Wallet is desirable for this because:
- People can instantly make very small tips without having to pay a large fee (relative to the tip amount). They could even send amounts smaller than 1 satoshi.
- People are more likely to keep any tips they receive in the system if withdrawing their BTC requires a higher fee and more time than sending tips does.
- I think that the best way to prevent people from infinitely inflating their "tips received" count is to charge a percentage fee based on the BTC amount sent. You could do this with Bitcoin transaction fees, but it's more complicated for the sender.

The exact requirements clearly need to be figured out before someone starts working on this.

Regarding the last point, the forum could require payment URIs send it a fee in order to publish it, couldn't it?  That would solve the tip inflation problem, and provide a source of revenue for the forum.

IMO the decentralized/universal nature of Mike's solution is too beneficial to overlook.

Edit: I didn't think about carefully about how people could cheat that...

[theymos]

Agreed about requirements, but why would you ever want to tip somebody less than 1 satoshi? That level of value is in the extreme-micropayment range, if I got a 1 satoshi tip I'd take it as an insult!

Do tips really need to double as a reputation system? The goal is to encourage posters to post more, right, not act as a publicly visible measure of reliability. If you just don't display the total amount of tips gathered by a user, or just show a list of usernames that pressed the tip button on a post, then the issue of tipping yourself goes away.

If someone sends 1 satoshi and the tipping service charges a fee, the recipient will get less than 1 satoshi. Then they might send that amount on to someone else. That's one possibility. I don't know how common that'd be.

I guess I'm not sure what the goal is. Reddit's bitcointip posts whenever someone gets a tip, which advertises the tipping system and gets people excited about Bitcoin. I was thinking that having a public tally of tips would get people interested in a similar way.

[d'aniel]

Regarding the last point, the forum could require payment URIs send it a fee in order to publish it, couldn't it?  That would solve the tip inflation problem, and provide a source of revenue for the forum.

IMO the decentralized/universal nature of Mike's solution is too beneficial to overlook.

Edit: I didn't think about carefully about how people could cheat that...

After actually bothering to read the details of Mike's proposal, the forum knows the private keys it's sending, and can withhold and spend enough of them to itself in order to satisfy their fee.  It could send the private key of the change address of this fee transaction to itself to the person being tipped.

Edit: Agh in too much of a hurry...  The tipper then wouldn't be able to double spend the fee change as desired, so the onus would have to be on him to include a private key with exactly the right amount.

[Tachikoma]

I've send an early proposal to Theymos and Evoorhees.

Regardless of the outcome I might be interested in building the service part of the job regardless. Any community based site could implement their own Bitcoin tipping they would just need to implement the tipping API. 

[d'aniel]

I think part of the charm of the Reddit bot is that it makes doing the +1 thing actually meaningful.  It's an overt, public show of thanks for a specific post.

With that in mind, the payment URIs contained in the signatures could contain a message labeling the post being tipped (unique URI per post).  As well, if the tipper is logged in, the URI could also include a message with the tipper's username.  This data would be relayed back to the forum from the tipper so that it knows which post to announce the tip on, and who it came from.

Edit: One last detail about tippers taking the glory, but then double spending their gift: the forum could police this by not sending private keys out to tipees directly, but through blockchain transactions instead.  Then if a user retracts their tips within, say, a month, the forum would know it was the tipper and not the tipee spending them, and could take away the tipper's glory privileges going forward.

Okay I'll stop now.  Too much coffee this morning  

[phelix]

[...]
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.

cough. for the bitcointalk top16 topics (http://blockchained.com) I am already scraping all messages on this forum. 

It is roughly 25MB per day. Please don't hit me Theymos.


300BTC is a generous bounty but otherwise I think tipping Bitcoins is simply not necessary. That fits a Q&A site much better.


What bitcointalk really needs is a "good post" feature (without "bad post" as we have learned painfully when we tried it right here a quite while ago). it is readily available for smf but theymos said it would harm diversification of opinion or something.


Erik please make the good post feature happen!

[gweedo]

[...]
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.

cough. for the bitcointalk top16 topics (http://blockchained.com) I am already scraping all messages on this forum. 

But it says on your site of the last 24hrs so are scraping in realtime or just every 24hours?

And if your already scrapping the site that is half the battle, then you can probably use something to login and post (probably request if it is in python cause that can save cookies) Your probably in the best position to write this.

[thezerg]

Erik,

As a developer I'd recommend that you change the format a little for medium sized awards like 300 BTC.  Bounties are great for quick stuff like "get this to compile on Ubuntu".

Instead ask for proposals and then award the best one the opportunity to do the work.  Proposals should contain how the system will work, resumes, how bugs will be fixed, license, and a completion date.  If they miss their completion date you have the opportunity to extend or move the offer to someone else. 

Offering a coding bounty -- AKA a "race" -- is going to get you shoddy (as fast as possible!) work, people with enough time on their hands to out-race other coders, and who are willing to risk their work being wasted just because someone else was a little faster.  But there has never been a time essentially since computers were invented when top quality programmers were not in great demand, so what kind of programmer really wants to grab at this?

Cheers!

[thezerg]

And let me just leave this here (from the reddit bitcoin tipper discussion) to encourage any interested developer to make a solution that can be easily extended to other services:

It is probably the single greatest thing to happen to BTC adoption rates.  Now, if we could find a way to do this for youtube we'd be set.

This is a great idea to expand the tips to YouTube.

Also, how can we integrate it with blog comments? That could become a particularly explosive niche. Perhaps a WordPress plugin that connects to the tip bot that allows it to interact with the blog?

With or without the help of the hosting site?  I was considering this project a few months ago.  The basic strategy:

create a website that lets you deposit small amounts of bitcoin or fiat (should be fraud resistant due to deposit limits).  And an automated way to create a tip jar.
users puts some btc in the tip jar and then posts a message on the blog, youtube vid, etc.  The tip jar can do this automatically for the top 5 sites (youtube,etc).

Problems:

1. Verification of the claimant (how to prove that the person claiming the tip jar actually did post the blog or upload the video)
2. Creating trust in the hosting website (i.e. your service), since it is holding the bitcoin.
3. May bend TOS for sites like youtube and/or be considered spam


Tips would also be a great way to encourage bug fixes in FOSS software.

With or without the help of the hosting site?  I was considering this project a few months ago.

... The tip jar can do this automatically for the top 5 sites (youtube,etc).

The WordPress plugin would be installed on each individual blog but report back with the server for the tipbot. Then the plugin could ping the tipbot when a tip needs to be verified and processed. The tipbots would also be able to monitor the sites (but don't eat too much bandwidth!) where the plugin is installed. Perhaps have a blogger API key for installation.

This would solve a need that bloggers have with a way to interact with and reward the community that develops around their blog. Good highly quality comments that are rewarded with bitcoins, by either the blogger or other commenters, would be an excellent way to get bitcoins into that community. Then the blogger could sell products, like ebooks, for bitcoins and spend bitcoins on hosting, etc. Plus, it would help bloggers counteract all the trolls from the Air Force's blog commenter program.

What I envision is a WordPress plugin that works kind of like Gravatar or Disquis where a commenter can create an identity in one place but have it show up in multiple places. 'Facebook comments' has tried to do this but most bloggers do not want their nasty code intertwining with their website. Comment sections often have great content but it is just really hard to find and weed through all the trash. People could make their tipping history public and then others could see where the insightful comments are.

Its an interesting proposal.  A generic tipbot server and then custom integrations with the top sites that solves issues like identity validation.  Last summer it was questionable (in my mind) whether these sites and the public would be "friendly" towards this kind of thing (as opposed to seeing it as some form of spam) but the reddit tipbot and the recent spate of legitimizing news may make the difference.

I wonder if SAAS APIs exist to integrate this with existing online wallets (blockchain, etc)... if so the job becomes a lot easier -- you wouldn't even need to handle the BTC and the additional development care and ongoing security maintenance that that implies.  Regardless, I expect the BTC held by this tipbot would be pretty limited and so not a great target for thieves.

[evoorhees]

Do tips really need to double as a reputation system? The goal is to encourage posters to post more, right, not act as a publicly visible measure of reliability. If you just don't display the total amount of tips gathered by a user, or just show a list of usernames that pressed the tip button on a post, then the issue of tipping yourself goes away.

I think it'd be cool if the tips doubled as a reputation system. Right now, forum users have their post count shown, which builds a rep somewhat... but showing an amount others paid to you for your wisdom would be far more valuable.

But yeah, there does need to be a defense against tipping oneself in this case.

[evoorhees]

[...]
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.

Erik please make the good post feature happen!

How does a good post feature avoid the self-inflating problem?

Ideally, this forum tipping system should double as a good post feature.

[evoorhees]

Erik,

As a developer I'd recommend that you change the format a little for medium sized awards like 300 BTC.  Bounties are great for quick stuff like "get this to compile on Ubuntu".

Instead ask for proposals and then award the best one the opportunity to do the work.  Proposals should contain how the system will work, resumes, how bugs will be fixed, license, and a completion date.  If they miss their completion date you have the opportunity to extend or move the offer to someone else. 

Offering a coding bounty -- AKA a "race" -- is going to get you shoddy (as fast as possible!) work, people with enough time on their hands to out-race other coders, and who are willing to risk their work being wasted just because someone else was a little faster.  But there has never been a time essentially since computers were invented when top quality programmers were not in great demand, so what kind of programmer really wants to grab at this?

Cheers!

I think you're right about this.

Anyone have a problem with this format? I'll approve a proposal, and then if it's completed successfully I'll pay the bounty. But, you have to get my proposal sign off first. Any issues with this?