ChangeTip is a solution to the transaction volume problem. Tips happen off of the blockchain.
It can't simultaneously be the solution to the transaction cost problem AND have transactions happen off of the blockchain. To legally operate at any sort of scale, they would have to implement financial and banking controls that would likely drive the transaction cost to traditional banking levels.
In order to solve the transaction cost problem, transactions MUST happen on the blockchain. Otherwise you just reintroduce the costs elsewhere.
Re:ChangeTip must die
by triplenineteen on Wednesday December 17, 2014 @02:59PM
(#8763981)
> Mere awareness of a transaction is too much friction when you're talking about fractions of a cent. Counting half-pennies is just not worth my time (ironically, half a penny is in the same ballpark of current advertising rates).
Couldn't this be solved with some kind of automation? It would take some standardization but what if clicking the ubiquitous "like" button on a piece of content sent a configurable amount of btc to the content creator?
Re:ChangeTip must die
by icebraining on Wednesday December 17, 2014 @03:07PM
(#8764030)
It's what Flattr does - they've been around for much longer, and they have an embeddable button that you can use to tip pages.
Then they will run into the same fundamental problem everyone else who has tried this did: the current Bitcoin implementation cannot handle the transaction volumes required to make this viable. This is the elephant in the room with decentralized currencies, and nobody's come up with a good solution yet.
Advertising rates for content will eventually stabilize. If the ad rates for content don't make it worth producing, people would stop producing it. Consumer content microtransactions simply aren't going to happen at any scale: it doesn't matter how low the cost is, any time you attach a marginal cost to an activity, you make them aware of the value proposition and the fact that there's a transaction happening. Mere awareness of a transaction is too much friction when you're talking about fractions of a cent. Counting half-pennies is just not worth my time (ironically, half a penny is in the same ballpark of current advertising rates).