Chaintip Creator Unveils New Tipping Tool Sharetip Interview Bitcoin News

Tipping internet users with cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin Cash, seems like a great way to spread adoption. The creator of one popular tipping tool is cooking up something brand new.

Self-Serve Tipping

It’s called Sharetip and I had the opportunity to try it. I tipped someone Bitcoin Cash on Medium and it was pretty smooth. Basically, it’s like a self-serve tipping tool that you can use on any platform. Imagine tipping on Youtube, Twitter, everywhere. And it is difficult to censor because the user notifies the creator themselves, rather than a bot. At news.Bitcoin.com, we got the inside scoop from Sharetip’s creator and asked some key questions

Jonald Fyookball (JF): First of all, can you tell us who are and how you got involved with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash?

Tibanne (Sharetip’s creator): I’m Tibanne, a Reddit name I made up to reply ‘meow’ to various bitcoin-related posts, and then later I adopted it as an anonymous nickname. I got involved with Bitcoin in early 2014 after the $1200 top Bitcoin bubble. When scaling was required to keep Bitcoin usable, I sided with the people (I believe it was the majority at the time) who wanted to up the block size limit in the short term while a scaling solution was found in the long term. It’s hard to know exactly why BTC was co-opted at the repository level.

My current two hypotheses are 1) certain devs got bought out by more powerful people wanting to keep crypto on the sidelines, and 2) certain devs got greedy, forming the for-profit company Blockstream, which aims to profit by moving transactions off the base layer and onto their own (Liquid). In either case, well-meaning devs were pushed away and their access to the core Bitcoin repository was blocked.

Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin to me as it retains the property of globally affordable, high confidence transaction sending.

JF: Your first tipping project was Chaintip. What inspired it?

Tibanne: I believe Chaintip was the first on-chain tipping bot. While there existed tippr (a custodial bot), I thought that making yet another custodial tipping bot was a bad idea and that an on-chain option would be preferable as a single hack wouldn’t put everyone’s balances in jeopardy. Chaintip links user’s addresses to their social accounts and then forwards tips to those addresses meaning that each user is always in control of their funds both before tipping and after receiving a tip. There is no concept of a ‘balance.’

JF: What about your new tool, Sharetip. How is it different from Chaintip?

Tibanne: For Chaintip to operate on a platform (Reddit, Github, and Twitter currently), an @chaintip user needs to be created on the platform and the code which speaks to that platform’s API needs to be written to make the bot function on the platform. While convenient to use, there are sometimes communication channel obstacles that need to be worked around. For example, the @chaintip bot on Twitter has to…