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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>"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
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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?
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.
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 agree with you about centralized versus decentralized solutions, but ChangeTIp clearly does NOT want to supplant bitcoin- they do their best to keep wallets small, and aren't trying to be a "bitcoin bank" / replacement ala Coinbase. Instead, they're driving adoption. What is there to complain about?
>For the record, I appreciate your technical critiques! But you seem to take a perverse delight in being the critic.
Ok, so you enjoy the technical content but disagree with the tone [1]? I can understand that. I genuinely feel sorry I don't have the time to build rapport. Many other bloggers regurgitate things we all agree on and make everyone feel warm and fuzzy inside. I figure that enough people already do this that I only need to chime in when the group-think is headed south.
They have no choice. There's no regulation around this so companies are forced to be transparent and convince their users they're legit.
We're just not used to companies being transparent because contracts around regulated industry are enforced by the force of law (threats of fine, imprisonment or violence).
We could have many more companies being transparent if only we didn't give them a way to use the force of law to convince users they're covered (think Bank of America and FDIC for instance. I'd rather Bank of America had to prove to me their investments are sound etc)
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.
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.
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?
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.