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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 wall

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?

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?