arsenische

Sorry, I am not sure Bitcoin can be a niche currency. It needs to be big enough to survive.

If most people prefer to use other crypto instead then Bitcoin may fall into a death spiral:

...lower the demand for bitcoins -> lower the price of bitcoin AND lower amount of bitcoin transactions -> less profitable the mining -> less secure the network -> lower the demand for bitcoins....

Thanks for the article. But I don't see where it says that Bitcoin can't scale 20x without decentralization problems.

I see that "the block size should not exceed 4MB for X=90%; and 38MB for X=50%", but I don't think that 50% reduction of number of nodes would be a serious decentralization problem (we've seen a similar reduction already due to the implementation of SPV clients).

Mining centralization could be a bigger problem, but with headers-first mining the block size wouldn't contribute to it.

Also the authors of the article assume the use of Bitcoin’s current peer-to-peer overlay network, that can be drastically optimized.

I've chosen 20x because Gavin had conducted 20Mb tests more than a year ago, before many optimizations took place.

There is nothing bad in the low fees. Low fees is the marketing strategy to boost the usage of Bitcoin and create the large enough ecosystem. Miners are being subsidised by bitcoin holders for a reason.

Larger the blocks while preserving a reasonable degree of decentralization -> lower the fees per transaction -> more people use Bitcoin -> more valuable the bitcoin ecosystem is -> higher the price of bitcoin -> mining is more profitable -> stable and secure infrastructure for the new global economy.

True, but we are not there yet. Bitcoin can probably scale 20x times without a problem. That would be 20 times lower transaction fees and 20 times more people using it.

Do you think Bitcoin Classic has chances to succeed? It looks like their hashing power is growing: http://nodecounter.com/#block_explorer

First, I want to apologize. We have received a lot of negative feedback suddenly and I can assure you that we take it seriously.

I temporary disabled ALL the email notifications (even though I don't think they were a real problem) and added a warning that we are not affiliated with project owners. When my teammate is online he will probably also some of the other issues.

I see a lot of misinformation about tip4commit and our intentions. I can't quickly respond to everybody, but I'll try to keep basic answers here: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/wiki/FAQ

Perhaps some people just misunderstand the project and hate it.

Also I think that it is normal that developers try to understand the motivation of users and ask questions in order to find a better solution, please don't take it as offence or reluctance to change.

We are going to resolve every issue or close the project.

Btw, if you think this project shouldn't exist - welcome to https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/157 - that could be the easiest solution for all of us.

If you believe the project can be improved - welcome to leave your feedback on the desired improvements, such as https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/152 and https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/154

or others.

Thanks for reading this and please accept apologies if we offended you (never wanted to).

we are not collecting or soliciting a contribution on someone's behalf.

Thank you very much! I am quite surprised because I remember fixing this issue in the same day patch became available and I run update recently. Upgrading the distro, hopefully it fixes the problem.

We don't impersonate anybody. We just provide additional way to reward project's contributors and perhaps attract more of them. We'll make it more explicit with https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/136

> If you ask me, it's more likely that this is the whole goal of "the project."

No, it is not. We just came with this idea for rails rumble competition, it was pretty spontaneous.

Sorry if "to the project" sounds ambiguous, I meant "to the funded project" (not to tip4commit unless we are talking about tips to https://tip4commit.com/github/tip4commit/tip4commit contributors).

yes, that's right, thanks!

> I assumed "the project" meant that the tip goes back into a general pool still dedicated to the particular project the tip was originally designated for.

This interpretation is correct

When I said "returned to the project's balance" - I meant "returned to the funded project's balance" so that other contributors to that project could receive them.

Sorry if sounds ambiguous, English is not my native language.

E. g. if you donate to reward contributors of https://tip4commit.com/github/bitcoin/bitcoin and some contributor doesn't specify bitcoin address to claim tips within 30 days then his or her tips will be returned back to bitcoin/bitcoin's balance (see this logic at https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/blob/master/app/mod...)

Thanks for your question. Currently it will just stay as unclaimed balance. But probably it is a good idea to return it back to the project eventually.

PS: Thanks for your hint regarding valid email addresses. If your email address is a@ai or something similar - you won't receive tips, sorry.

replaced it with a github icon there

replaced it with a little cat.. is it better?

Hopefully in the long term low effort trivial (but yet useful) fixes will become a scarce resource.

We have just implemented this feature. All the commits with email addresses that don't have "." in its domain name will be ignored. Thanks!

if you mean trivial yet still useful commits, then hopefully it will be harder to abuse when all the simple things are improved

You are right. But it is not a salary, it is just a tip. If developer spent time to make even a tiny useful commit - that is good. Probably with time it will become harder to find tiny commits. And donations will probably keep accumulating thus creating higher incentive for more complex commits.

Yes, why not (we can't be sure that it was you who donated to your project). At least you know it works ;) Thanks for trying out!

Hm... Do you mean to allow the merger to specify the value of the commit? E. g. by default it could be 1%, but merger can make it smaller if commit is not very valuable. Sounds like a good idea, thanks!

Yes, it is a risk. Same question partially answered here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=315802.msg3910308#ms... . If project gets traction then most of the collected bitcoins will probably be stored in offline wallet (and hopefully 5% fees would allow to cover losses in case of a hot wallet hack).

update: fixed a mistake (online to offline)

IMO if this commit is useful - accept it. It will reduce the next reward by only 1%. Sooner or later all the simple ways to get tips will exhaust. The project will be a bit closer to perfection. And maybe you will have one more happy developer.

That's right.

We made this project as a part of Rails Rumble contest and are using a limited-time free server offered by them.

So we need to collect money to move to a new server, to cover transaction fees and to continue development of this service if it is demanded.

Maybe we should remove the fees, go opensource and crowdfund ourselves. We were discussing it but haven't made such decision yet.

We don't expect to hold large amounts for a long time because large amounts should attract dozens of commits every day (and thus will turn into small amounts quickly).

If it doesn't happen then we will probably introduce a fixed minimum size for a tip or some other mechanism to solve this problem.

Probably it is good to hold money for some time and to smooth the tip rewards thus placing authors of commits into nearly equal position.

Our initial idea was that each donation pays for 30 days of tips (and rewards depended on interval between commits, see http://blog.anonymousads.com/2013/10/tip4commit-first-bitcoi...). But that idea appeared to be more complicated and a bit unfair (consecutive commits could receive very different amounts). So we switched to a simpler one. Yes, mathematically speaking, there will always be some money in our wallet. But we don't expect to have huge amounts of money there since donations are never stable and some projects have dozens commits daily.

A small bug caused this problem, we fixed it. Thanks for your message!

Thanks for kind words!

I like your idea of putting developers' bitcoin address into commit message. I totally agree with you that direct tips are instant and reliable, they don't require trust to any third party.

However most developers probably don't even have a Bitcoin address, we hope to change that :)

Maybe in future we implement some other metrics, but as Palomides said, they can be gamed.

It is just a tip, some additional incentive to make new commits. Hopefully it will attract attention of new developers to the projects that are needed by people.