Please make it accept bitcoin. No, seriously.

If you convert the bitcoins to cash automatically on reception I don't see any issues with people's confidence in the currency -- it just transparently becomes a payment vector for real dollars that automatically get exchanged via mtgox or whatever.

I really look forward to the day when I can just toss a few bitcoins towards programmers or musicians on the internet. Right now, signing up my credit card for every website I want to interact with is just not going to happen, and Paypal isn't an option for me either.

I wish services like bandcamp and things like bug bounties and the like allowed me to just throw some coins their way, but instead there's this whole complicated credit system with one or more third parties to deal with, and it's annoying. I hate typing my CC number into every damn website I want to make a microtransaction with.

Personally I don't know or care whether bitcoin will transform world economics the way some people predict, but I do think it's a pretty convenient way to deal with internet transactions, even if it's just used as a temporary medium for real currency. This kind of thing, in all honesty, is its "killer app."

I'm not opposed to accepting bitcoin if it's transparent as you describe. As krasin mentions the recurring thing is a sticking point. Here's the ticket:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/14

Thanks. Some pretty interesting discussion on that bug actually. Although I think it wouldn't be too hard to rig up yourself, I have to agree with the guy who suggests just hooking up with a 3rd-party bitcoin payment processor--it might make things easier and more similar to handling other currencies.

The issue with bitcoin (at least, now) is that it does not easily allow to make recurring charges (which is what gittip about)

I disagree. If I started getting into the habit of throwing some bitcoins at gittip, I might be inclined to send a few over and keep them there with the intention of distributing them to people without having to do a new transaction each time. If they're just used as a way to fill my account there and then instantly changed to dollars, what's the difference between that and a bank transfer? (Except that there is no fee and no hassle.)

There's an important difference here.

If you have subscribed with a credit card, and forgot about the subscription (but generally fine with it), the service would still receive weekly payments.

In case of bitcoin, if you have forgot (that would be the case for 80% of us), the payments are stopped.

But I completely agree that it's possible to implement subscriptions (read: automatic payments) on top of the existing Bitcoin infrastructure.

BitCoin has a pretty serious stigma as an unreliable, hacker friendly currency/scam for trying to buy illegal shit. I think embracing it on a platform that's already niche will make it harder to be seen as a legitimate platform for earning a living.

Please, elaborate.

About doing what you really want and getting an income: sometime they don't mix well.

Right now, I am just building projects on whatever I felt like doing. Some are no doubt, useful to everybody else. However, the rest may be just be interesting only to me or solve a problem that is unique only to me.

Do I know where I will get my money? No clues. However, it been a blast for me, personally. I learn a few tech such as meteor.js and how to develop chrome extensions, although I really want greybeard knowledge(algorithms, debugging, and other core skills), not the latest fad.

Yeah, it's about making the world better on your terms. I think the crowd can be a better proxy of value to society than the corporation.

You will still need to market yourself to the crowd and find work that you like but that the crowd will fund.

Some passions, no doubt, will not be rewarded.

Very, very true.

I applaud his courage, but leaving a job for $115.73 per week seems a bit risky. Maybe if this concept was combined with something like Kickstarter it would be more effective. E.g. you create an open-source project and pledge to continue development on it as long as your Gittip payments stay above a certain threshold.

> In the mean time, I will be looking for about 50 hours a month of contract work to stay afloat

I like the idea of Gittip, and I have definitely thought about the problem of how society can encourage things that benefit it (i.e. open source software).

I had a bad experience with Gittip though. I tried to tip you. It said sign in with github, so I did. Then I go back. I tried to tip you again, and it said there was an error. Then I clicked "back with a credit card". And it says I need to sign in with github to add a credit card. But it already says I'm signed in as my user name in the upper right corner. So something is wrong.

Also I think it would be better to allow one-time payments too. I just wanted to try your system but I wasn't committed to making a recurring payment. I was going to cancel it after I tried it. I would have been fine with a one-time payment.

On the one-time payments issue, see:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/113

The short story is that Gittip is targeted at funders, and the current wisdom is that one-off payments would erode confidence in the stability of one's funding stream. Yes, you can do what you were planning to do, pay for a week and then cancel, but Gittip doesn't want to optimize for that, I don't think.

Why are you targeting for "funders" (I think you mean the people getting paid)?

In general, getting the money into systems is the hard part. If money is there, people will come - easy! Getting people to give money - whether to a company or for donations - that's hard!

Also, frankly, this is a nice proposition from the POV of the "funders". You seem to have built it for yourself. But, the value for the donors? Sounds like a tough sell.

So making donors happy is most important. Without them you're toast. With them you can AT LEAST support yourself, if nothing else :)

The value for donors is "the feeling of participation in someone else's story" (quote from Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley[0]). It's up to recipients to tell a compelling story with their life. That's what's going to get money into the system. Tell me a story!

[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/the-po...

Is there a way for people to tip without being members of Github? I imagine that a lot of the beneficiaries of say, jQuery's goodness, aren't necessarily on Github at all.

Short answer: No.

Long answer: You're right, and I want to expand beyond GitHub. Here's the ticket:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/80

Ouch, thanks for reporting. :-(

Digging a bit ...

Started a ticket:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/143

Okay, I'm sorry for this. I don't have good logging set up yet (see https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/115), so I'm not easily able to recover the traceback. :^(

Obviously this is a big problem. Has anyone else seen this?

If it helps, when I click 0.25 cents, there is a modal popup that says "sorry something went wrong :(" I guess that is your unhandled traceback message?

If so there are a bunch of error logging services you can sign up for... or some you can download and run yourself.

After I click get that message, it appears that I'm signed out, and I have to sign back in.

I wish you luck with Gittip! It is a model I hope will become viable soon.

I wired up Loggly's Heroku app. It was really easy. I'm seeing a few "out of memory" errors connecting to the db. My current theory is that one of these at just the wrong moment got your account in an inconsistent state.

Can I ask your username?

Also, I'm back online and logging. Any chance you'd be willing to trigger the error again?

I've started tailing and storing logs locally to try to capture this.

I've got to turn my laptop off for a while. :-(

I've ticketed setting up a log tail somewhere else:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/144

I did catch one other (less significant) error by watching the logs.

I'm sorry for the bad experience. :-(

How does this compare with Flattr? It may be slightly different, but is it sufficiently different?

Flattr is for content. Gittip is for people.

Flattr is optimized for making tippers feel good. Gittip is optimized for making tippees a living.

Flattr takes a 10% cut. Gittip is drinking its own whiskey.

Thanks. I understood all of this from the website. Can you be more specific?

> Flattr is for content. Gittip is for people.

> Flattr is optimized for making tippers feel good. Gittip is optimized for making tippees a living.

What is stopping me from using Flattr for myself? Am I stopped from putting a Flattr thing on my own general personal home page? Am I going to get more money from Gittip over Flattr, and why? Rather than telling me what Gittip is aimed at, can you tell me specifically what Gittip is doing better here? Anything tangible?

I don't believe anything is stopping you from using Flattr.

I don't believe you are stopped from putting Flattr on your home page.

I don't have enough data to say whether you're going to get more money from Gittip over Flattr. I don't have data for Flattr because they're not transparent about who makes a living on their site. I'd love to see data if you have it; I've only been able to find a few anecdotes:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://tim.geekheim....

http://www.quora.com/Flattr/Have-any-bloggers-used-Flattr-to...

I don't have data for Gittip because it's only a month old. That said, Gittip is much more transparent than Flattr. On the Flattr homepage (http://flattr.com/) I see one piece of data: "Flattr clicks so far: 1,055,458." That doesn't tell me anything about who's making a living on Flattr. A little digging uncovers this Toplist:

http://flattr.com/catalog/everything/toplist

There I see that the top ... 30(?) projects have received between 919 and 5,184 "flattrs." When I click on the top project, WikiLeaks' Afghanistan War Diaries, I'm told it has "10 145 flattrs received from 4169 people." I'm not sure how this relates to the 5,184 flattrs mentioned on the Toplist. Whether it's 5,184 or 10,145, I'm not able to find a conversion rate to a real currency, such as euros or dollars. From reading the About page and the FAQ, it sounds like there's actually an inverse correlation, since more flattrs mean each recipient receives a smaller slice of each budget. Moreover, I don't know how many individual people and which ones are behind a project. Are those 5k or 10k flattrs shared amongst 10 people or two? Who are these people? How much do they want to receive?

Gittip is more transparent about who's giving and receiving what, and why. Sure, the design isn't very fancy compared to Flattr. But there's data right front and center on the homepage, and it's in a real currency, dollars. When I click through to an account, I see a statement about what that person is doing to improve the world, and their personal funding goal. I can compare their goal with their current level of funding.

Personally, I'm not interested in playing games with fake currency. Let's move real money for real.

You glossed over the fact that I'm drinking my own whiskey, which I see as a crucial difference. I actually find it a little distasteful that Flattr takes a 10% cut. If the Flattr developers believe in Flattr, why don't they make their living using Flattr? TipTheWeb strikes me as a more self-consistent implementation of the "one-off tips for content" idea, in that they represent themselves as being a non-profit "supported by Tips from our users":

http://tiptheweb.org/

But, of course, Gittip is not about one-off tips for content. Gittip is about sustaining people who are telling a compelling story with their life. Tell me a story!

As a former Flattr developer my impression is that Flattr's lack of focus on hard numbers is due to one of its core values when it was founded - that all flattrs are equal and should be treated as such - that a flattr doesn't just represent the number of euros given but more so represents the act of giving in itself and that that's what important about it and that the actual size of the donation is secondary as that is dependent on so many factors like the givers personal economical status and such.

As long as people feel comfortable with what they are giving away and recievers feel comfortable with what they are recieving then how much each individual is giving is pretty irrelevant.

Flattr would never reveal any numbers about their users' economy as Flattr very much values, respects and sees the importance in their users' privacy. It's of course always lovely to see users share stories about how they are using Flattr in different ways, but the telling of such stories should be up to the users – Flattr should stay out of that business and instead focus solely on just making such stories possible.

Regarding fees, I think the Pinboard blog makes a great case for why they should exist: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ Apart from that I also think that micropayment services are a bit like what Steve Jobs described Dropbox as: "a feature, not a product" Features are embedded into products and are not something you pay for separately. Flattr isn't the goal – it's the means to realize the goals – it's the goals, the "products", that people want and it's they that will be flattred and it's they that should be flattred.

> How does this compare with Flattr? It may be slightly different, but is it sufficiently different?

Gittip works, flattr does not for the most part. Flattr works probably if you push out a ton of content, but that's pretty much it. If you want to get recurring donations for an open source project or something similar without spending a lot of time with the system you can pretty much ignore flatt.

Also you can't be paid on flattr unless you pay others at the same time.

Correction: You do not have to pay others at the same time.

He's proven his belief in the product by taking a stand. This is already more than most could hope to do. For that I offer my applause. If this isn't a next big thing, it at least offers a life changing mindset. For that I offer my thanks.

:^)

So what are the restrictions on getting money out?

That's a major concern to me. You say you handle them manually, but do you have restrictions on how much money can be paid out, what country the recipient may be resident in, etc?

Here's the ticket for implementing automatic payouts:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/22

Balanced Payments is contributing code for integrating with their service. I'm hoping to have this rolled out in the next week or two. Balanced can only underwrite payees in the US. Hopefully we'll start seeing support for Canada, UK, and Europe in 2013.

Gittip itself has no a priori restrictions. You can withdraw your full balance less processing fees at any time. If we can't find a way to get you your money automatically then I'll write you a check and put it in the mail. Or PayPal it. Or whatever.

So Gittip is a recurring donation platform for Github authors ?

Pretty much, yes.

I want to expand it beyond GitHub, but yes.

+1 on expanding. making github-only tools when they could as well work in a more generic way is a bit ridiculous.

Hey, cut me some slack! This is only a month old and I had to start somewhere. Here's the ticket for opening up:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/80

chill, it was more of a friendly pat on the back than a slap in the face. you made a good decision to generalize it so soon, kudos.

:^)

Well, you don't need to just use it for GitHub projects, as long as people wanting to contribute know your GitHub username.

I was just wondering when GitHub would do something along these lines. You beat them to it!

You saw this?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4233482

I guess GitHub tried to integrate with Pledgie years ago:

https://github.com/blog/57-getting-paid-the-open-source-way/

Maybe they'll be willing to try again with Gittip? :-)

Eating your own dogfood: an excellent idea :)

Can it be drinking my own whiskey instead?

I guess if I want it to be that I'd better make some whiskey. Hmm ... ;-)

my previous managers always talked about "drinking your own champagne"...

He's probably not putting a cork in it.

Figuratively speaking.

can you use dwolla to reduce your costs?

http://developers.dwolla.com/bd/why