Topic: [Discussion] Forum tipping service (Read 514 times)

I think this is an excellent idea and I can definitely get behind it! I have been thinking for a while that this forum needs something of this sort. I would also love to see a Btalk Lotto fund that could be awarded to any active user on this website that contributes. Wow I hope this happens. Keep up the great work here Black Hat!

I do feel like the need to provide service to this community after all that I have earned and learned. However, I doubt if this particular will succeed. Besides the cost of operating this service, there are the legal costs which I've accounted for. And, due to the minimum overall recognition, it discourages me further to continue building it.

But, I'm patient. I want to give it a couple of months, and see if it's seemed as interesting.

That can theoretically work, but you need to submit your node's public key, and I'll send with keysend every x days. But, I don't like it, because it is less flexible.

1. Registration page generates you a random, unique passcode.
2. You are told to post this passcode on a topic which is for server registrations only.
3. Once you do, you submit the post link.
4. My server scrapes the page and verifies you are indeed the owner.
5. Then, a private code is generated, displayed on the front end, and you're added in the database.

Can you implement some sort of sort and settle once a day/week instead of a manual invoice?

And what's the plan for account authentication?

I'd also like to state I like seeing the BCT plugins idea finally being utilized here on bct.(about time)

Let's just say his precious m!xer income ($1200/month, while the minimum wage in Greece is €660/month) was lost permanently, so he has to find another source of income.

I'm curious to find out what Greek lawyers have to say about a centralized money transmitting service with no licence and no regulation...

Don't worry, he's very young and he'll learn many lessons the hard way.

To me it seems highly ironic that he has criticized heavily CEX in the past (Angelo loves flip-flopping), even though they're regulated services (at least Binance is, that's why they got a hefty 4 billion $ fine) and now he's back to promote a centralized service with zero regulation and most people here don't even know his real name, his address, his occupation etc. CZ is not anonymous, everyone knows who he is.

Oh well, maybe the Greek authorities will have to interrogate Mr. Angelo after all...

I spent over 1 hour going through the entire post and reply including the one from the first one you made. And I must say the forum tipping is quite a nice idea however it seems forum members are not in much support of it (for now).
I noticed from all your replies that you really wanted to make it possible and you still do . So my best suggestion is;

Take your time to create all the necessary programs and setups including the extension like you mentioned and store it somewhere safe . The forum may want it sometime in the future. Besides if you observe, theymos didn't accept the 2FA until some years later and power glove already had it ready and sitting somewhere so implementing it was quick and easy.
Just create , store and relax.

This solves the problem of an attacker stealing everyone's funds by compromising a machine I have no physical control over, but it does not mean the funds cannot move without the user's digital signature which is what I believe was your argument.

There is indeed risk with trusting a remote computer for not getting compromised. Nonetheless, the purpose of a VPS is to provide isolation and consistent uptime. Allocating a local computer for this process doesn't seem like a responsible course of action. Lots of lightning nodes operating on AWS and Google cloud servers, and with a lot more liquidity than this one, gives me the impression that I can trust it.

It's exciting to think that an individual might gain some tips for writing a nice post. It is the same way the merit system works, with the difference that tipping is not necessary to upgrade membership. I fear that an issue will develop and the tipping system become an evaluation tool for publications and members, especially since anyone can manipulate the system by depositing a large amount and sending tips to accounts that he wants to appear better than others. By studying the suspicions that some people have regarding the merit system, you will be able to identify many details that you may have missed during the design.

@BHC
In fact, I find it a brilliant idea and I am sure it will receive great support from the community here.
Certainly, there are many who do not prefer custodial services of all kinds in order to preserve their privacy, but your reputation on the forum is what lends legitimacy to the concept. I advise you not to be upset or pay too much attention to some destructive criticism.

I wish you good luck and success.
Cheers,

first of all..
CEX at the most basic level do a thing called hot/cold wallet. where they dont keep full stash on the public access server that do order/payment/withdrawal requests.
second of all they FAIL when they get hacked and lose their hotwallet stash because they should keep even the hot wallet stash separate from the public access server

again if you have 2 servers.. one is the public access that takes the user requests and a second one that remotely sniffs the public server to read such requests and perform them separate. you add an extra layer of security.

like i said, the cheap affordable low maintenance approach would be to use the forums PM inbox to take requests and then your home PC does the payments. where you keep your funds separate. and keep your home pc unidentifiable from the forum/extension, thus avoid hacker finding your home pc

if you however want to hotwallet any/all funds on the same server that takes the user requests(public access) then you are not even doing basic security of a CEX..  it shows you are not ready to manage funds
because you prefer not to care about security and are expecting to one day shout "i been hacked"

..
so like i said if users sigup to you a with public address (much like sigcampaign applicants use bitcoin addresses to sign up)
YOU no longer need to create, manage, store, give out private keys/codes.... because doing so is a security risk

and instead you can verify a user is making a genuine request by them sending you a signed message that proves the request is unique, independent and genuine. which stops hackers from just spamming everyones "code" to raid you dry.. and stops hackers getting everyones codes because there is no central store to get codes

much like you proved you didnt sell your account by signing your 'black' vanity address..
without anyone needing to manage your private key centrally

It is definitely not ideal, but in my experience, it is the only solution that survives. For example, look on stacker.news. It started as an alternative to Hacker News with tips, but it has transformed into a small forum overtime. The concept of tips, as it turns out, proved to be a successful idea.

I would prefer to implement this in the most transparent manner feasible, but achieving self-custody seems too unrealistic.

I've had troubles in real life. I took care of them. I warned about my departure, because I didn't want to be the guy that suddenly disappeared without informing anyone.

Sorry to intervene but does this mean that BHC should tell us why he decided to leave and then came back? I mean aren't we all allowed to take a break? Perhaps you don't like the fact that he made a "goodbye" post instead of simply disappearing for a while. I mean what is your concern? That he left for a reason we should know? Or that he is not the same person?

I did poorly at relaying this but these where my sentiments exactly.

@BlackHatCoiner I'm personally going to give you benefit of the doubt and tell myself , That's the original BHC based on the fact your putting time into LN in an altruistic manner. Custodial or not the risk I feel are low with you at the wheel.

With that being said I'm going to level with you.

 You introduced doubt before a product launch.

I know your a private individual but it would be a little naive of us to proceed without some explanation wouldn't it?
(In regards to your departure and return)

Edit -1337 that's neat.

@BlackHatCoiner, I support the idea, it would definitely be an improvement of the forum, but...
The technical part that you present is too centralized and therefore is not the best solution. Here's an example from a couple of months ago when you wanted to take a break from the forum, that shouldn't happen if you started this thing. And honestly, there are many reasons why any of us won't, can't or don't want to come to this forum at some point.

This is not any doubt in you or criticism against you, I'm just expressing the first thing I thought when I read your proposal.

If a hacker hacks the server, they can take the money. Whether we use digital signatures or private codes in plain text, the money are sitting on the server and can be claimed if the machine is compromised.

A hacker isn't supposed to steal everyone's codes. They are supposed to compromise the server, and if the server (or the home computer in your analogy) is compromised, digital signatures provide no extra security. The private code is only used to authenticate your account; it is the same as choosing a strong password. If you're concerned about impersonation (e.g., hacker steals your private code and pretends to be you), I can promise to only keep the hash of the codes (which can be verified on the front-end).

This is the same as telling me that a centralized exchange which asks for a public key is more secure than one that asks for a password. Both are central point of failures which can be compromised regardless.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.63358011.

This is getting off-topic. If you believe I'm not the person who owned the account before 2024, you can ask me to sign a message (as I have already done in the linked post above).

he has always been promoting middlemen services that take in coins and manage them and release them on a different date. (mixers, subnetworks)
he has always idolised centralised development(core)
but before was just the promotion guy taking affiliate/advertising revenue.
but yea seems strange to see him now want to be a business owner going legit, having to be transparent about all money flows he touches(which is different to his supposed 'privacy' advertising)

chances are 50:50 the user writing posts in 2024 is not the same greek echo chamber of previous years. although other topics since return did smell of the same scripted rhetoric.. but that could have been just a planned act to make a few posts in the tone of the previous guy, just to hide the hand over of account

I'm a little confused, didn't you say like 2 weeks ago your done here?
Now your back with a custodial service?
Your a member I rub shoulders with a lot and your recent activity is very out of character.

if you are the creator, storer and provider of peoples identity(secret code). that becomes not only a minus of privacy, but if you are hacked the hacker can pretend to be everyone and raid your custody by spamming you with everyones code they accessed, if you have it all mingled together on your server
(bad security on so many levels)

however if your system operates remotely where a public access server just receives payment requests. (where payments are done separately to requests) EG lets say using this forums inbox of Private messages to receive payment requests. and your home PC separately performs the payments

and just from remote pc sniff your forum inbox for pm's you are one step further back from being hacked
if users provide you a public key to register them as their iD(you dont need access to their private key). and when making payments they request to you (via PM message or browser extension) a signed message by signing it with THEIR private key. then a hacker cant just spam your mailbox with everyones code, nor get everyones private key from your side

thus your subnetwork node is not on a public access server to be hacked. and the payment messages cant be hacked as a whole because they are separate and peoples secret is not available from any part you have access to

..
come on its 2024.. you must know bitcoin well enough by now that having users provide their own public keys for ID is far far far better then you as a custodian creating silly private pin numbers to users where you store the pin numbers incase they forget..(where you can be hacked to drain everyone)

wake up

you do not need to know people private keys/codes/pins to provide a secure system.. bitcoin pub/priv keypairs is the most basic thing of bitcoin you should utilise, where by they provide you the public. and signed massages so that you dont need to worry about the private

You don't have to be passive aggressive.

Would you trust Binance more if they made their platform open-source on Github?

Most likely not, because it's a custodial service. That's what I meant for Alby. If you trust them for your funds, use them.

The idea is brilliant.

It is widely used with Nostr UIs. For example this is Jack Mallers' profile. You can head over to the lightning icon and it will load a screen like this:



If you click on the "Zap X sats" icon it will guide you to a QR code and a lightning invoice.

Then, clicking on the "pay now" it will require you to open the wallet of your choice in order to pay. For example we could use something like alby, which requires a plugin to be installed on the browser.

So, to break it down for you, in order for this to function, we need:

1. A way to post invoices as a payee. This one is tricky if you don't run your own node, but theoretically you could create an invoice and post it somewhere. Once the invoice is paid, it gets cancelled and then they need to enter a new one. This should take place automatically. I suggest reading how nostr implements it, as defined in NIP-57.

2. A way to pay someone as a payer. This one is very easy in my opinion, because you can use whatever wallet you want.

It's less attractive. To make an account you need to provide a public key, which you must have generated beforehand. Besides, since I will have custody of your funds, why does it matter? Whether it is a private code, or a signed message, it happens for me to authenticate your account.

I'm not afraid it will lead to a "tip race" of the first page, as it already exists with merits. I'm afraid it will be abused in the following manner: alt accounts will tip each other and make it look as if they're millionaires. It doesn't harm anyone though, does it? Pretty much the opposite. It reveals who owns alt accounts.

No, because very few people run lightning nodes, and if you don't run a lightning node, you don't have custody in lightning.

I'll contact them when needed. Thanks.

---

If someone has thought of a way to send tips without forfeiting custody of their sat and without running a node, inform me. I will completely reconstruct the project from zero. Currently, the only viable solution appears to be one without custody. While I strongly advocate for self-custody, I don't perceive it as a significant concern, given that tips are intended to be of modest amounts.

Yeah but that is going to be a whole new extensions starting from scratch, that usually means lot of bugs and not many people willing to test it.

I mean this, open source MIT license:
https://github.com/getAlby/lightning-browser-extension

I don't think it's hard to explain (to most people) what that means 
Go ahead and make your own non-custodial alternative, can't wait to see it.

Alby is custodial, IIRC. What do you mean it's open-source?

I find the idea very interesting, a bit like the bot that lets you tip sats on r/Bitcoin.

However, aren't you afraid that this will lead to a form of abuse on the forum (spam, the race to be on the first page of a new topic etc.)? This already exists, but wouldn't such a feature make things worse?

And aren't these just parallel merits?
We all already have the option of putting a BTC address on our profile, wouldn't it be easier to add a LN profile-box for potential tips (if fees remain high on-chain)? That would solve the custody problem.

and there is the immoral of the story
keep cycling blackhats custody funds around inside blackhats database

its not even an original story


blackhat also providing and managing "private codes"
HAAA funny

much easier that users use their own keys and just send blackhat PM of a signatured message
[pay poster of message link=topic=5480044.msg63431048#msg63431048 date=1704229260 100sat]
signed with address: bc1q....

that way blackhat knows who authorised it and users can register their own 'signing' PUBLIC key to use as proof of authority, so that even blackhat doesnt touch private keys

Indeed. Just imported all the usernames of bitcointalk in a mysql table, and searched four of them. It finished in less than a second. Caching and hash indexes are probably what speed up data retrieval by that degree.

Or, if you don't have enough balance to withdraw the minimum amount of the exchange, you can tip others. I have not used Kraken, though, it might accept any lightning amount.

Cool, but as per my understanding, getAlby's browser extension is sort of like a lightweight lightning wallet. My browsing extension will simply send API requests and play a little bit with the forum's page structure.

There is no problem, you will just click on "Lost my private code" and be requested to re-prove your account's ownership, similarly as to when you registered.

The problem is when the private code is compromised. In that case, the attacker can steal your tips.

well if you got to lock value into blackhat. knowing the onchain fee's are more then $5. you would end up throwing in 99x of $5 just to make the fee worthy of just 1% thinking you then dont have to keep topping up..
so in the end you will end up giving more then $5 to blackhat.. because.. economics

same issue arrises on the way out(closing) as bencodie explains



well he is greek, so he is part of EU so it would be registering as a PFP (payment facilitation provider) rather than the american term MSB
and he would need to register using the guidelines of Mica

now that he realises that he would have to operate officially as a PFP. maybe he will be see it now more "attractive" to create a decentralise/user custody system without a middleman

heck he doesnt even need to use LN. but instead another subnetwork, heck he can even design a new subnetwork without the LN flaws..

I think you have came up with a very nice idea and if somehow you get success in implementing it on this forum even in the form of an extension then that would be an amazing feature for many users. I believe mostly the ones who are running their own announcement threads can use the tipping feature to tip those users who post useful and informative posts on those announcement threads.

I would like to know that what can we do if we unfortunately lose that private code that was given to us during registration?

Can we somehow be able to recover it in case if we lose it or we won't be able to get it again?

Another important thing I want to know that the ones who may send tips should must have accounts on your server or they can directly do that by installing the extension?

I think adding Tipping service in bitcointalk forum would be very good, but I am no sure all members are ready for LN yet.
A while ago one of our local board members posted interesting open source LN project called getalby.com, maybe you should check it out.
This is already made browser extension and project is active with updates and development.
I think getlaby would work perfectly integrated with bitcointalk forum.

Databases can be more efficient than you expect. I have 51,9 million posts on my Elasticsearch database and just queried for all your posts on my archive (8538) in less than 1 second. Now think about caching!

You don't have to setup and close your own channels. You can forward your tips to an exchange that supports LN, like Kraken, and there it is.

I will have custody of the funds. But, the funds will be yours. I was thinking of implementing a solution that would respect self-custody, but it would require you to run a lightning node. That is a serious burden and not attractive.

This forum is barely handling reports to moderators. I very much doubt it would ever introduce such a feature.

Campaign participants should not be paid in lightning. This is why:

Not ready, yet.

I'm working on MySQL. It just sounds computationally inexpensive to tell of a user is banned or inactive, versus search for a message ID on a table with all the tipping transactions.

Thanks. Feedback is very welcomed.

In the case of $0.25/tip (probably the higher end of the average tip if this system were live, bar inevitably ridiculous exceptions) , it would take an individual to receive 40-160 ($10-$40) tips just to make closing the LN channel to redeem their tips worth it. Not feasible in these network conditions, and not very feasible even in conditions where BTC network traffic is lower. Yes, I know, it is a novelty feature, not for people to care about being able to redeem their tips or closing the channel...but that is still an important factor nonetheless.

If signature campaigns are not used with LN (which would then exceed the risk level of this centralized feature excessively), then the result of this tipping system is likely to be an pointless feature due to its very limited redeemability...Think about it...what one earns over 1, 2, or 3 years in tips, is what a signature campaign could earn in 0.5-1 week...

Not to mention, merits indirectly enable signature campaigns... So, merits already serve the purpose of a tip in a way.

...and again, it's centralized, opening the door to a lot of potential issues and vulnerabilities for users and the operator.

I see the novelty here though I personally wouldn't use this feature, and I wouldn't encourage anyone to use this feature. Time and effort could be better spent elsewhere.

Get all posts on the current page -> send a single request to your API with an array of post ids -> data is returned if any tipping was found -> render it on the page.

BPIP's extension does something similar. You get into a topic, it will send a single query for all users on the current page and show if they were banned or are inactive, if they are DT1/2, etc... I even have an API which is used by the extension to grab the number of topics the user has posted to.

The data for every tipping should be indexed on a database like Postgres or Elasticsearch (both used for the ninjastic.space website). Then searching it is trivial.

No slowing down whatsoever.

Will you be controlling all the funds? I was hoping this to be implemented on forum itself. It is actually a brilliant idea and further more it could be used even to pay campaign participants all through the use of LN, I think the LN shills need to invest in this idea with financial support, a great opportunity to introduce LN to the masses. Where do I sign up?

Correct. So you should not deposit amounts you can't afford to lose.

I don't see how this is funny, but indeed. That is a money transmitting service.

---

I would kindly request to keep the discussion on-topic and not on the legal part which is my business. The point of this thread is to see how many people are interested, and to discuss potential problems I might even have not thought of yet.

That's true, but it's not like the stakes are too high. How many people would use this extension? How many would deposit even $10 at once? I would definitely keep (risk) $5 in my account to tip $0.25 or so to a few posts. And topping it up would be easy (and cheap).

Register to whom?

in short. blackhatcoin owns your coin. you just get HIS msat balance of his database

funny part is by operating a payment facility. blackhatcoiner becomes a MSB and has to register and then follow regulations.. (KYC)

I've started developing an old project that I had left behind, bitcointalk lightning tips. If you're interested in this idea, I kindly ask you to post your opinion below.

For the time being, it will work like this:

• Accounts can be created by proving you own your bitcointalk account. Once registration is complete, you will be given a private code which must be kept secret. You only need this to login, and your session lasts for a long time.
• To tip a post, you need to have a balance. To have a balance, you need to deposit via lightning. You will be given an invoice to pay from my server.
• When someone tips you, your balance increases. To withdraw your bitcoin, you provide a lightning invoice (bolt 11).
• A browser extension will be available, where you can view tipped posts in the same way merit transactions are publicly available. e.g., Merited by BlackHatCoiner (4), sat tipped by BlackHatCoiner (1,000)
• Tips can be also made privately if you don't want the rest of the users to view to which users you send or by which you receive tips.
• A registered account can tip any post, even authors that do not have an account on my server. They can claim their tips once they register.

I would like to dedicate this topic for discussion. I want to see how many people are interested / would use it.

My main problem is the architecture of the browser extension. I'm struggling to see how you will query my database for tips. Querying 25 tips (which is the maximum posts a page can have) sounds like really slowing down the browsing experience in bitcointalk. Do you have any recommendations on to how to do this efficiently?