5 ms·

ChangeTip must die

53 points by bakli 12y ago

jessedhillon 12y ago
This article fails on two basic points: 1. The fees can be collected on transfers which occur between two members of the network without funds leaving the wallet. That's clearly the long-term goal of any network -- to grow to the point where everybody is on it. 2. The stated goal of ChangeTip, as seen in their videos and materials, is to replace advertising and other indirect ways of monetizing content with a way to directly express support for creators. Advertising is a model whereby content creators get vanishingly small amounts of money for views, while having to place their content next to third-party claims and pitches which they do not endorse. Historically this has been because the rates on payment processing have dwarfed the actual value that a single article or video view delivers to a single consumer, so asking for half a penny was not feasible. You can express that level of support with BTC however.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  > 2. The stated goal of ChangeTip, as seen in their videos and materials, is to replace advertising and other indirect ways of monetizing content with a way to directly express support for creators. This isn't feasible if people are giving $0.001 donations frequently and unironically. You'd need thousands of donations to buy a coffee.
  - onion2k 12y ago
    So long as its all transparent and frictionless that's fine. Imagine if everyone paid $0.0001 to watch a YouTube video... Its cheap, but popular content would earn the creator a very significant sum.. That's the goal.
    - beambot 12y ago
      For perspective... if we compare to CPM on YouTube views (and account for Google's take), $0.0001 is one to two orders of magnitude less than what content creators earn via forced advertising consumption.
    - SyncTheory13 12y ago
      Seeing as the YouTube video with the most views, Gangnam Style, has less than 2.2 billion views as of today... And the top channel has less than 7.1 billion views... I think the tip amount would need to be closer to $0.10/view, which I personally would not pay.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
      You'd need ten thousand views for a dollar.
- zo1 12y ago
  >"2. The stated goal of ChangeTip, as seen in their videos and materials, is to replace advertising and other indirect ways of monetizing content with a way to directly express support for creators." Was this not what Flattr was all about? How is this service better/different to that one? I haven't tried using either service, yet
  - jamoes 12y ago
    This is exactly what Flattr is all about (they're still around). Flattr has to deal with credit card fraud though, and all the issues surrounding it. This means they need to spend a non-insignificant portion of their operational budget dealing with risk analysis for all of the payouts they make. And, as their userbase grows, the cost of dealing with fraud also grows. It also means they have to ask their users tons of invasive questions. Changetip, on the other hand, can accept deposits and make withdrawals with 100% confidence that they will not need to eat the cost at some point in the next 6 months. The downside is dealing with the security cost of storing their stash of bitcoins - but this is a fixed cost that doesn't grow as their userbase scales.
- exelius 12y ago
  > 2. The stated goal of ChangeTip, as seen in their videos and materials, is to replace advertising and other indirect ways of monetizing content with a way to directly express support for creators. Then they will run into the same fundamental problem everyone else who has tried this did: the current Bitcoin implementation cannot handle the transaction volumes required to make this viable. This is the elephant in the room with decentralized currencies, and nobody's come up with a good solution yet. Advertising rates for content will eventually stabilize. If the ad rates for content don't make it worth producing, people would stop producing it. Consumer content microtransactions simply aren't going to happen at any scale: it doesn't matter how low the cost is, any time you attach a marginal cost to an activity, you make them aware of the value proposition and the fact that there's a transaction happening. Mere awareness of a transaction is too much friction when you're talking about fractions of a cent. Counting half-pennies is just not worth my time (ironically, half a penny is in the same ballpark of current advertising rates).
  - natrius 12y ago
    ChangeTip is a solution to the transaction volume problem. Tips happen off of the blockchain.
    - exelius 12y ago
      It can't simultaneously be the solution to the transaction cost problem AND have transactions happen off of the blockchain. To legally operate at any sort of scale, they would have to implement financial and banking controls that would likely drive the transaction cost to traditional banking levels. In order to solve the transaction cost problem, transactions MUST happen on the blockchain. Otherwise you just reintroduce the costs elsewhere.
  - triplenineteen 12y ago
    > Mere awareness of a transaction is too much friction when you're talking about fractions of a cent. Counting half-pennies is just not worth my time (ironically, half a penny is in the same ballpark of current advertising rates). Couldn't this be solved with some kind of automation? It would take some standardization but what if clicking the ubiquitous "like" button on a piece of content sent a configurable amount of btc to the content creator?
doctorfoo 12y ago
Oh, it's that guy that hates everything. ChangeTip is cool. It is a Bitcoin killer app. Like it or not, giving tips, even to people who don't need them, is fun. And for every person who is tipped who may not want or need it, I've seen some kid who is quite happy as they realise they've just been gifted something worth a few dollars. And then their journey into Bitcoin begins as they try to figure out how to actually spend it.
- tolkienfanatic 12y ago
  Had EGS as my Systems prof at Cornell. Can confirm that he doesn't hate everything and is actually a really cool guy :)
- random_ind_dude 12y ago
  That explains what I saw in a few Reddit threads where a user was tipping everyone for no reason at all! Some of the users that got tipped got angry and some got curious about Bitcoin.
- emin-gun-sirer 12y ago
  It's critical to not conflate Bitcoin with ChangeTip. The two are, in effect, separate currencies. One is decentralized and backed by the blockchain, the other is centralized and backed by a company. A litmus test for centralized currencies is to ask the question "can they create wealth out of the thin air by manipulating a database entry?" The answer is affirmative for ChangeTip. To their credit, they maintain proof-of-reserves online, so while we do not know the amounts held by their users, we have an idea of how much they can pay out. I applaud the transparency they have shown. I won't respond to the drive-by ad hominem.
  - recycleme 12y ago
    > It's critical to not conflate Bitcoin with ChangeTip. The two are, in effect, separate currencies. I might be missing something here but ChangeTip is not a currency.
    - 12y ago
Buge 12y ago
> last month's craze in the Bitcoin world, a new service for tipping people online, called ChangeTip. It's not new. I's been around for a while.
- mhluongo 12y ago
  They've suddenly grown a ton, and they recently raised a round. EDIT: My point being, most people are just now hearing about them :)
mcintyre1994 12y ago
It's hard to argue against tip bots if you look at Dogecoin. Everything charitable, everything unique, everything that got them in the news was because they nailed tipping.
freework 12y ago
Most tips I see are not "fractions of a penny" but rather the standard seems to be 1000 bits which is like 32 cents. I often see people tip a dollar or more. Secondly, I can never understand why some people get so offended by someone giving them a small amount of money. When you go to the coffee shop to buy a $2.40 coffee and are given $0.60 in change are you insulted by the cashier for thinking you needed that 60 cents?
- ta75757 12y ago
  They're not giving you $0.60, they're completing the transaction of you giving them $2.40. Socially it's not the same.
- astrodust 12y ago
  If you just got a $200 haircut would you tip $0.60? Throwing $0.0001 at someone for their commit on a project is insulting. I'd rather have a unicode thumb or a +1.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

53 points by bakli 12y ago

This article fails on two basic points: 1. The fees can be collected on transfers which occur between two members of the network without funds leaving the wallet. That's clearly the long-term goal of any network -- to grow to the point where everybody is on it. 2. The stated goal of ChangeTip, as seen in their videos and materials, is to replace advertising and other indirect ways of monetizing content with a way to directly express support for creators. Advertising is a model whereby content creators get vanishingly small amounts of money for views, while having to place their content next to third-party claims and pitches which they do not endorse. Historically this has been because the rates on payment processing have dwarfed the actual value that a single article or video view delivers to a single consumer, so asking for half a penny was not feasible. You can express that level of support with BTC however.

minimaxir 12y ago
> 2. The stated goal of ChangeTip, as seen in their videos and materials, is to replace advertising and other indirect ways of monetizing content with a way to directly express support for creators. This isn't feasible if people are giving $0.001 donations frequently and unironically. You'd need thousands of donations to buy a coffee.
- onion2k 12y ago
  So long as its all transparent and frictionless that's fine. Imagine if everyone paid $0.0001 to watch a YouTube video... Its cheap, but popular content would earn the creator a very significant sum.. That's the goal.
  - beambot 12y ago
    For perspective... if we compare to CPM on YouTube views (and account for Google's take), $0.0001 is one to two orders of magnitude less than what content creators earn via forced advertising consumption.
  - SyncTheory13 12y ago
    Seeing as the YouTube video with the most views, Gangnam Style, has less than 2.2 billion views as of today... And the top channel has less than 7.1 billion views... I think the tip amount would need to be closer to $0.10/view, which I personally would not pay.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
    You'd need ten thousand views for a dollar.
zo1 12y ago
>"2. The stated goal of ChangeTip, as seen in their videos and materials, is to replace advertising and other indirect ways of monetizing content with a way to directly express support for creators." Was this not what Flattr was all about? How is this service better/different to that one? I haven't tried using either service, yet
- jamoes 12y ago
  This is exactly what Flattr is all about (they're still around). Flattr has to deal with credit card fraud though, and all the issues surrounding it. This means they need to spend a non-insignificant portion of their operational budget dealing with risk analysis for all of the payouts they make. And, as their userbase grows, the cost of dealing with fraud also grows. It also means they have to ask their users tons of invasive questions. Changetip, on the other hand, can accept deposits and make withdrawals with 100% confidence that they will not need to eat the cost at some point in the next 6 months. The downside is dealing with the security cost of storing their stash of bitcoins - but this is a fixed cost that doesn't grow as their userbase scales.
exelius 12y ago
> 2. The stated goal of ChangeTip, as seen in their videos and materials, is to replace advertising and other indirect ways of monetizing content with a way to directly express support for creators. Then they will run into the same fundamental problem everyone else who has tried this did: the current Bitcoin implementation cannot handle the transaction volumes required to make this viable. This is the elephant in the room with decentralized currencies, and nobody's come up with a good solution yet. Advertising rates for content will eventually stabilize. If the ad rates for content don't make it worth producing, people would stop producing it. Consumer content microtransactions simply aren't going to happen at any scale: it doesn't matter how low the cost is, any time you attach a marginal cost to an activity, you make them aware of the value proposition and the fact that there's a transaction happening. Mere awareness of a transaction is too much friction when you're talking about fractions of a cent. Counting half-pennies is just not worth my time (ironically, half a penny is in the same ballpark of current advertising rates).
- natrius 12y ago
  ChangeTip is a solution to the transaction volume problem. Tips happen off of the blockchain.
  - exelius 12y ago
    It can't simultaneously be the solution to the transaction cost problem AND have transactions happen off of the blockchain. To legally operate at any sort of scale, they would have to implement financial and banking controls that would likely drive the transaction cost to traditional banking levels. In order to solve the transaction cost problem, transactions MUST happen on the blockchain. Otherwise you just reintroduce the costs elsewhere.
- triplenineteen 12y ago
  > Mere awareness of a transaction is too much friction when you're talking about fractions of a cent. Counting half-pennies is just not worth my time (ironically, half a penny is in the same ballpark of current advertising rates). Couldn't this be solved with some kind of automation? It would take some standardization but what if clicking the ubiquitous "like" button on a piece of content sent a configurable amount of btc to the content creator?

doctorfoo 12y ago

Oh, it's that guy that hates everything. ChangeTip is cool. It is a Bitcoin killer app. Like it or not, giving tips, even to people who don't need them, is fun. And for every person who is tipped who may not want or need it, I've seen some kid who is quite happy as they realise they've just been gifted something worth a few dollars. And then their journey into Bitcoin begins as they try to figure out how to actually spend it.

tolkienfanatic 12y ago
Had EGS as my Systems prof at Cornell. Can confirm that he doesn't hate everything and is actually a really cool guy :)
random_ind_dude 12y ago
That explains what I saw in a few Reddit threads where a user was tipping everyone for no reason at all! Some of the users that got tipped got angry and some got curious about Bitcoin.
emin-gun-sirer 12y ago
It's critical to not conflate Bitcoin with ChangeTip. The two are, in effect, separate currencies. One is decentralized and backed by the blockchain, the other is centralized and backed by a company. A litmus test for centralized currencies is to ask the question "can they create wealth out of the thin air by manipulating a database entry?" The answer is affirmative for ChangeTip. To their credit, they maintain proof-of-reserves online, so while we do not know the amounts held by their users, we have an idea of how much they can pay out. I applaud the transparency they have shown. I won't respond to the drive-by ad hominem.
- recycleme 12y ago
  > It's critical to not conflate Bitcoin with ChangeTip. The two are, in effect, separate currencies. I might be missing something here but ChangeTip is not a currency.
  - 12y ago

Buge 12y ago

> last month's craze in the Bitcoin world, a new service for tipping people online, called ChangeTip. It's not new. I's been around for a while.

mhluongo 12y ago
They've suddenly grown a ton, and they recently raised a round. EDIT: My point being, most people are just now hearing about them :)

mcintyre1994 12y ago

It's hard to argue against tip bots if you look at Dogecoin. Everything charitable, everything unique, everything that got them in the news was because they nailed tipping.

freework 12y ago

Most tips I see are not "fractions of a penny" but rather the standard seems to be 1000 bits which is like 32 cents. I often see people tip a dollar or more. Secondly, I can never understand why some people get so offended by someone giving them a small amount of money. When you go to the coffee shop to buy a $2.40 coffee and are given $0.60 in change are you insulted by the cashier for thinking you needed that 60 cents?

ta75757 12y ago
They're not giving you $0.60, they're completing the transaction of you giving them $2.40. Socially it's not the same.
astrodust 12y ago
If you just got a $200 haircut would you tip $0.60? Throwing $0.0001 at someone for their commit on a project is insulting. I'd rather have a unicode thumb or a +1.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]