We all had this moment when we are sitting in front of a pc screen, skimming through tweets. Just to give our head a 5 minute break, and if really lucky, to have dry chuckle over a joke with a millennia old expiration date. Suddenly you have a sip of fresh air, a miracle, a divine intervention of sorts. Something that was so elegantly compressed into 140 characters yet so perfectly in time and full of meaning to you, that the only thought that flashes through your mind is: “You Sir/Madam should be paid for this”.
Now, you can do that. A new service (if it can be called that) has arisen on the Internet. www.tippercoin.com a new tool allows you to leave some of your sweet bitcoins as a way of saying “Thanks!” to a stranger that lightened up your mood.
After you log in with a Twitter account you can send coins around to those microbloggers you believe worth of attention. When the transaction is made the public tweet notifies both users of it.
Another cool thing is the tippercoin’s working principle. Signing in there via Twitter creates a new Bitcoin address, which is activated when you feed it a minimum of 0.0002 BTC. Then the only thing left to do if you want to give away some cryptocurrency is to tweet that lucky person mentioning @Person’sUsername #tippercoin and the amount of BTC you wish them to have from you. For examples see their public tweet, every half an hour or so someone sends away a handful of digital money.
The bot will automatically find this tweet then the recipient. If the latter does not have a digital wallet yet, it will be created. After the former is done bot sends the coins are (not forgetting to subtract 0.0001 BTC “Miner’s fee”).
I’m not a chronic Twitter user, but the basis of this idea looks very neat. Tipping in social networks can become a new trend this and hopefully the following years. It can potentially become a new source of funds for videobloggers, whose “youtube salaries” have been significantly lowered after the amount of viewers had surpassed all expectations.
Thinking about youtube and blogging why not go even further. You probably remember phrases such as “20000 likes and I will shave my cat”. A new movement of pay-to-watch or pay-to-read might arise. “0.05 BTC for the new video of me” could be the modern means of survival for those who blog through their lives.
As for me, I see this as the opportunity to show my gratitude to people that made my day without even knowing it.