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Topic: [ON HOLD - 300 BTC] Make a bitcointalk forum plugin to allow tipping via BTC - page 2. (Read 8375 times)

sr. member
Activity: 322
Merit: 251
Is theymos willing to run a bitcoind instance on this server, or is there another e-wallet online which allows sending to addresses within the same service without a fee, and furthermore has a nice API?

If so, this should be relatively easy:

Like Tachikoma said, simply allow users to fund their account, and tip from their account. This makes it transparent as to who's tipping a user (hell, you can even mark as anonymous if you have over 100 posts, let's say), and keeps it easy and subtracts the whole fee required.

If these conditions are met, and what I just proposed works, I may try to make one of these real fast.

EDIT - Actually, you could just run this off of a random service, keep the "amount a user owns" in a database. That amount is accessible to them, but it doesn't need to actually move coins around the addresses.
legendary
Activity: 1008
Merit: 1023
Democracy is the original 51% attack

If you send tips to an account which is not activated yet the system will simply hold the coins for you.


Could you elaborate on this part? I think it's necessary that the recipient of the tip gets a message alerting him that he has funds awaiting him.
legendary
Activity: 1246
Merit: 1010
Erik,

As a developer I'd recommend that you change the format a little for medium sized awards like 300 BTC.  Bounties are great for quick stuff like "get this to compile on Ubuntu".

Instead ask for proposals and then award the best one the opportunity to do the work.  Proposals should contain how the system will work, resumes, how bugs will be fixed, license, and a completion date.  If they miss their completion date you have the opportunity to extend or move the offer to someone else. 

Offering a coding bounty -- AKA a "race" -- is going to get you shoddy (as fast as possible!) work, people with enough time on their hands to out-race other coders, and who are willing to risk their work being wasted just because someone else was a little faster.  But there has never been a time essentially since computers were invented when top quality programmers were not in great demand, so what kind of programmer really wants to grab at this?

Cheers!


I think you're right about this.

Anyone have a problem with this format? I'll approve a proposal, and then if it's completed successfully I'll pay the bounty. But, you have to get my proposal sign off first. Any issues with this?

I agree with thezerg on this, as well. I'd tip him if there was such a feature.   Fast | Cheap | Correct : Choose two


Thanks!  Half my day job is being a "coder-dad" -- I clean up all the junk my people leave behind  Smiley
WRT a tip its always appreciated but not necessary!  16ExHi8FZ848JDsDqrGAXgXbyyLWhdDMe9

Erik, I don't know yet if I have the time to propose, but if I don't (that is, you see nothing from me by whenever you decide to decide) then I'd be happy to do a technical review of the proposals.
legendary
Activity: 1102
Merit: 1014

I think you're right about this.

Anyone have a problem with this format? I'll approve a proposal, and then if it's completed successfully I'll pay the bounty. But, you have to get my proposal sign off first. Any issues with this?

So do we submit proposals here or by PM?
full member
Activity: 216
Merit: 100
Erik,

As a developer I'd recommend that you change the format a little for medium sized awards like 300 BTC.  Bounties are great for quick stuff like "get this to compile on Ubuntu".

Instead ask for proposals and then award the best one the opportunity to do the work.  Proposals should contain how the system will work, resumes, how bugs will be fixed, license, and a completion date.  If they miss their completion date you have the opportunity to extend or move the offer to someone else. 

Offering a coding bounty -- AKA a "race" -- is going to get you shoddy (as fast as possible!) work, people with enough time on their hands to out-race other coders, and who are willing to risk their work being wasted just because someone else was a little faster.  But there has never been a time essentially since computers were invented when top quality programmers were not in great demand, so what kind of programmer really wants to grab at this?

Cheers!


I think you're right about this.

Anyone have a problem with this format? I'll approve a proposal, and then if it's completed successfully I'll pay the bounty. But, you have to get my proposal sign off first. Any issues with this?

I agree with thezerg on this, as well. I'd tip him if there was such a feature.   Fast | Cheap | Correct : Choose two
legendary
Activity: 1246
Merit: 1010
seems good from a user's perspective.  4 suggestions:
put typical tip amounts in the dialog box so we don't have to type numbers in
refund if not claimed within a month
put the tip destination address in the box so we don't have to hold btc in your service if we don't want to.  So tipping direct is inconvenient but possible.
Limit the total tip amount to slow down thieves -- just an added protection alongside the fact that there should not be too many btc in your tipping act
hero member
Activity: 938
Merit: 1000
I've been thinking and prototyping over the last 24 hours with my business partner (I know stupid word) and I think we've come up with a plan that solves most of the issues concerns mentioned here on the forums. We want to make it public now to get some constructive feedback and see if we indeed covered all bases. I will try to not get into too much technical details.

The system would exist of two parts. On the one hand would be a website (service) with an API interface and on the other hand a plugin for SMF that talks to this API. The plan is to create both pieces of code so they can work neatly together.

As a forum member this is how tipping would work.



Each post has an unique 'tip link' that you can press to send a tip to author of the post, specifically for that post.

If you press the 'tip link' one of two things can happen.
  • If you already tipped before: you will get a small modal with an input box that mentions your current balance and asks you how much want to tip.
  • If you have not tipped before: you will instead receive a message your tipping account has been activated and you will be presented with a bitcoin address to fund your account.


Tipping will only be possible if your account is funded either by depositing money or by receiving tips.

If you send tips to an account which is not activated yet the system will simply hold the coins for you. Since you send the internal forum user id with each tip you can later redeem an account if you wish to active your own tipping account, the funds will be automatically in your account at that point.

Tipping yourself is not possible the tip link won't show on posts that are your own. And even if you try to bypass that we can do an extra check on the server side since we have the internal forum id.

Behind the scenes the forum software should do a query to the API service (on cron) to retrieve all tips made and save this in a local table to be used as cache so the tips can be shown on the forum. It will show a total amount received on the left side of the post where general user info is displayed. And the amount of tips received for that post will be displayed next to the date of the post since this is post specific information.



legendary
Activity: 1708
Merit: 1020
[...]
If this was made a bot, what would happen is the bot would have its own account on the forums which it logs into, and users could send commands via pm (for balance checking, depositing, withdrawing) and also tip people by posting +bitcointip in a thread, like how the reddit bot works. The bot & wallet could be hosted elsewhere & could work without specifically needing permission from Theymos (unless he bans the account of course). This is how reddit tip works.
[...]

what happens if your account is not funded?
if you send to an unknown user?

imho the bot solution has issues.


What about something like the Good Post/Bad Post Mod backed by btc?

Theymos?


If one could set the tipping amount to 0 we would even get the "good post" feature for free  Wink

donator
Activity: 1731
Merit: 1008
This might be the greatest enabler of constructive discussion around bitcoin.
legendary
Activity: 1400
Merit: 1005
Are there any other services that will host a wallet in a secure and safe fashion for you?

Am not sure how much I would trust any online wallet but I will say that the support from WalletBit is quite good (there you go Kris - something positive from me at last).


This looks better but still a little too much. The ideal situation would be a service where you would simply get json-rpc details to a hosted bitcoind instance where the third party ensures security for the hosting. Does that exist?
YES.  Jfreak was advertising exactly such a service earlier in the year.  I thought it was neat, but didn't have any use for it.  It sounded like he had it very secure (as much as a live bitcoind instance can be secured, anyway).  Contact him for more details though.
legendary
Activity: 1008
Merit: 1023
Democracy is the original 51% attack
Erik,

As a developer I'd recommend that you change the format a little for medium sized awards like 300 BTC.  Bounties are great for quick stuff like "get this to compile on Ubuntu".

Instead ask for proposals and then award the best one the opportunity to do the work.  Proposals should contain how the system will work, resumes, how bugs will be fixed, license, and a completion date.  If they miss their completion date you have the opportunity to extend or move the offer to someone else. 

Offering a coding bounty -- AKA a "race" -- is going to get you shoddy (as fast as possible!) work, people with enough time on their hands to out-race other coders, and who are willing to risk their work being wasted just because someone else was a little faster.  But there has never been a time essentially since computers were invented when top quality programmers were not in great demand, so what kind of programmer really wants to grab at this?

Cheers!


I think you're right about this.

Anyone have a problem with this format? I'll approve a proposal, and then if it's completed successfully I'll pay the bounty. But, you have to get my proposal sign off first. Any issues with this?
legendary
Activity: 1008
Merit: 1023
Democracy is the original 51% attack
[...]
you have to do a lot of scrapping, but I think if someone was to make a tipping bot they would have to clear it with theymos first. Since this bot would use a lot of bandwidth and could be confused for a DDOS attack.


Erik please make the good post feature happen!



How does a good post feature avoid the self-inflating problem?

Ideally, this forum tipping system should double as a good post feature.
legendary
Activity: 1008
Merit: 1023
Democracy is the original 51% attack

Do tips really need to double as a reputation system? The goal is to encourage posters to post more, right, not act as a publicly visible measure of reliability. If you just don't display the total amount of tips gathered by a user, or just show a list of usernames that pressed the tip button on a post, then the issue of tipping yourself goes away.

I think it'd be cool if the tips doubled as a reputation system. Right now, forum users have their post count shown, which builds a rep somewhat... but showing an amount others paid to you for your wisdom would be far more valuable.

But yeah, there does need to be a defense against tipping oneself in this case.
legendary
Activity: 1246
Merit: 1010
And let me just leave this here (from the reddit bitcoin tipper discussion) to encourage any interested developer to make a solution that can be easily extended to other services:

It is probably the single greatest thing to happen to BTC adoption rates.  Now, if we could find a way to do this for youtube we'd be set.

This is a great idea to expand the tips to YouTube.

Also, how can we integrate it with blog comments? That could become a particularly explosive niche. Perhaps a WordPress plugin that connects to the tip bot that allows it to interact with the blog?

With or without the help of the hosting site?  I was considering this project a few months ago.  The basic strategy:

create a website that lets you deposit small amounts of bitcoin or fiat (should be fraud resistant due to deposit limits).  And an automated way to create a tip jar.
users puts some btc in the tip jar and then posts a message on the blog, youtube vid, etc.  The tip jar can do this automatically for the top 5 sites (youtube,etc).

Problems:

1. Verification of the claimant (how to prove that the person claiming the tip jar actually did post the blog or upload the video)
2. Creating trust in the hosting website (i.e. your service), since it is holding the bitcoin.
3. May bend TOS for sites like youtube and/or be considered spam


Tips would also be a great way to encourage bug fixes in FOSS software.



With or without the help of the hosting site?  I was considering this project a few months ago.

... The tip jar can do this automatically for the top 5 sites (youtube,etc).

The WordPress plugin would be installed on each individual blog but report back with the server for the tipbot. Then the plugin could ping the tipbot when a tip needs to be verified and processed. The tipbots would also be able to monitor the sites (but don't eat too much bandwidth!) where the plugin is installed. Perhaps have a blogger API key for installation.

This would solve a need that bloggers have with a way to interact with and reward the community that develops around their blog. Good highly quality comments that are rewarded with bitcoins, by either the blogger or other commenters, would be an excellent way to get bitcoins into that community. Then the blogger could sell products, like ebooks, for bitcoins and spend bitcoins on hosting, etc. Plus, it would help bloggers counteract all the trolls from the Air Force's blog commenter program.

What I envision is a WordPress plugin that works kind of like Gravatar or Disquis where a commenter can create an identity in one place but have it show up in multiple places. 'Facebook comments' has tried to do this but most bloggers do not want their nasty code intertwining with their website. Comment sections often have great content but it is just really hard to find and weed through all the trash. People could make their tipping history public and then others could see where the insightful comments are.

Its an interesting proposal.  A generic tipbot server and then custom integrations with the top sites that solves issues like identity validation.  Last summer it was questionable (in my mind) whether these sites and the public would be "friendly" towards this kind of thing (as opposed to seeing it as some form of spam) but the reddit tipbot and the recent spate of legitimizing news may make the difference.

I wonder if SAAS APIs exist to integrate this with existing online wallets (blockchain, etc)... if so the job becomes a lot easier -- you wouldn't even need to handle the BTC and the additional development care and ongoing security maintenance that that implies.  Regardless, I expect the BTC held by this tipbot would be pretty limited and so not a great target for thieves.

legendary
Activity: 1246
Merit: 1010
Erik,

As a developer I'd recommend that you change the format a little for medium sized awards like 300 BTC.  Bounties are great for quick stuff like "get this to compile on Ubuntu".

Instead ask for proposals and then award the best one the opportunity to do the work.  Proposals should contain how the system will work, resumes, how bugs will be fixed, license, and a completion date.  If they miss their completion date you have the opportunity to extend or move the offer to someone else. 

Offering a coding bounty -- AKA a "race" -- is going to get you shoddy (as fast as possible!) work, people with enough time on their hands to out-race other coders, and who are willing to risk their work being wasted just because someone else was a little faster.  But there has never been a time essentially since computers were invented when top quality programmers were not in great demand, so what kind of programmer really wants to grab at this?

Cheers!
legendary
Activity: 1498
Merit: 1000
[...]
you have to do a lot of scrapping, but I think if someone was to make a tipping bot they would have to clear it with theymos first. Since this bot would use a lot of bandwidth and could be confused for a DDOS attack.

cough. for the bitcointalk top16 topics (http://blockchained.com) I am already scraping all messages on this forum. 

But it says on your site of the last 24hrs so are scraping in realtime or just every 24hours?

And if your already scrapping the site that is half the battle, then you can probably use something to login and post (probably request if it is in python cause that can save cookies) Your probably in the best position to write this.
legendary
Activity: 1708
Merit: 1020
[...]
you have to do a lot of scrapping, but I think if someone was to make a tipping bot they would have to clear it with theymos first. Since this bot would use a lot of bandwidth and could be confused for a DDOS attack.

cough. for the bitcointalk top16 topics (http://blockchained.com) I am already scraping all messages on this forum. 

It is roughly 25MB per day. Please don't hit me Theymos. Grin


300BTC is a generous bounty but otherwise I think tipping Bitcoins is simply not necessary. That fits a Q&A site much better.


What bitcointalk really needs is a "good post" feature (without "bad post" as we have learned painfully when we tried it right here a quite while ago). it is readily available for smf but theymos said it would harm diversification of opinion or something.


Erik please make the good post feature happen!

sr. member
Activity: 461
Merit: 251
I think part of the charm of the Reddit bot is that it makes doing the +1 thing actually meaningful.  It's an overt, public show of thanks for a specific post.

With that in mind, the payment URIs contained in the signatures could contain a message labeling the post being tipped (unique URI per post).  As well, if the tipper is logged in, the URI could also include a message with the tipper's username.  This data would be relayed back to the forum from the tipper so that it knows which post to announce the tip on, and who it came from.

Edit: One last detail about tippers taking the glory, but then double spending their gift: the forum could police this by not sending private keys out to tipees directly, but through blockchain transactions instead.  Then if a user retracts their tips within, say, a month, the forum would know it was the tipper and not the tipee spending them, and could take away the tipper's glory privileges going forward.

Okay I'll stop now.  Too much coffee this morning  Smiley
hero member
Activity: 938
Merit: 1000
I've send an early proposal to Theymos and Evoorhees.

Regardless of the outcome I might be interested in building the service part of the job regardless. Any community based site could implement their own Bitcoin tipping they would just need to implement the tipping API. 
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