The problem with this funding model is that it encourages fluff pull requests, such as this one: <a href="https://github.com/sferik/t/pull/138/files" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sferik/t/pull/138/files</a>.<p>If there was no financial incentive, I would probably merge it but now I'm questioning the motivations of the committer. If I merge this, it means there will be less money for someone else, who makes a more significant contribution in the future.<p>Personally, I prefer Gittip’s model to incentivize open-source contributions, if only because it doesn’t create this kind of noise for project maintainers.
Projects like these is where Bitcoin can really shine.<p>Maybe Bitcoin will conquer the world, maybe it won't. I have no idea.<p>What I do know is there is real utility in being "electronic petty cash" which Bitcoin can easily become.<p>Imagine: Alice sends Bob a few bitcoins after Bob writes a particularly insightful comment on HN. Bob then comes across a great blog post by Charlie and sends him a few bitcoins. Charlie then finds an open-source project by Diane that will save him hours of work and sends her a few bitcoins. And so on.<p>It rarely would get converted to USD and wouldn't amount to much when it did. Instead, people would just earn a bit here and spend a bit here.<p>Bitcoin enthusiasts miss that USD works fine for most people. But right now it's really hard to do the above scenario using traditional banking. I don't want to connect my bank account to some website to send a someone a few bucks. It's just not worth the hassle/potential risk.<p>I can't be the first person to think of this. But I'm just not seeing much movement in this direction. Am I overlooking something? Or do I just need to be patient?
I like the idea of prepaying bit coins on bounties [presumably tied to an issue/bug report in GitHub] which is what I thought this was at first. As is seems a bit confusing, are all commits treated equally? I'd be peeved if I donated money then saw it get split up among people who did minor clean up, typo fixes, etc. Flip side, I'd be peeved if I spent a bunch of time on a commit then saw the same money go to someone doing a typo fix level commit.<p>Don't know if the whole intrinsic/extrinsic motivations factor will make this idea crater in any form but I think tweaking the current model is advisable in any case.<p>Best of luck.
I hate to be a party pooper here, but if this project would ever take off, and the project would receive serious amounts of bitcoin that would mean that serious amount of bitcoin would have to be managed and secured by whoever runs that project.<p>The past has shown that everyone, even persons who run e-wallets and currency exchanges, severely underestimates the amount of security such an endeavour requires.<p>There's a hundred questions you should ask anyone who asks you to keep care of bitcoin. How large is the hot wallet? How is the offline wallet stored? Where's the source code? What hardware does the service run on? Who are you? What will you do when someone steals your hot wallet? What monitors do you run to make sure the books add up?<p>So, nice idea, but please make sure this is actually going to be safe.<p>(BTW there seems to be a way to escrow bitcoin where a third party decides if the transaction should pass, but that third party never gains access to the bitcoin themselves, I haven't read the details of it, but that would seem perfect for this sort of thing)
Awesome! It looks like a virtuous circle for both open source & the bitcoin network. Really hope this will take off.
However, in my opinion, you should definitely switch to mB (mili-bits), and please add retina icons for the readme. I just added one of my projects there (github.com:mgcrea/angular-strap), this will be quite interesting to watch!
Can someone more familiar with $BITC explain how Bitcoins can be portioned? I get that each bitcoin is a unique number - how can 0.4 of a number belong to someone and the other 0.6 of that number belong to someone else?
I assume it's not affiliated with the projects at all. This is an independently-run tip system for open source projects. Cool idea.<p>Key disclaimer though, is that only 95% of donations for tips go to the coders. And if every commit donates 1% of the balance to the commit, that means that the project almost never donates it's full balance. So if this ever really takes off, the original developer of tip4commit will be holding a lot of money that takes a long time to pay out.
MCServer, a FOSS Minecraft server is also on here: <a href="http://tip4commit.com/projects/74" rel="nofollow">http://tip4commit.com/projects/74</a><p>We haven't got any outside donations yet, but I think it would be quite a good way to reward contributors, and I put a bitcent in to try it out.
It looks to me like bors, the integration bot, will be getting all of the mozilla/rust tips: <a href="http://tip4commit.com/projects/149" rel="nofollow">http://tip4commit.com/projects/149</a>.
This seems like an accidental perverse incentive. While you only get the top if your commit is accepted, I would be worried the maintainers will just end up with a bunch of low effort trivial patches.
Got a tip putting the tip4commit link in the readme...!
<a href="http://tip4commit.com/projects/143" rel="nofollow">http://tip4commit.com/projects/143</a><p>Not sure this is intended behavior.<p>Shouldn't the owner of repositories be out of scope (or at least make it configurable)? tipping myself minus the commission is no fun ;-).<p>PS: would make sense to have a signup via github
Is this operated with some sort of commit hook or done manually by the project maintainers or what?<p>Edit: At present this is obviously an MVP that is probably being completely "faked" on the back-end, so I suppose my question should be "What is the intended design?"
All projects on tip4commit, conveniently sorted by tipjar size desc: <a href="http://tip4commit.com/projects" rel="nofollow">http://tip4commit.com/projects</a><p>Only 15 projects with a nonzero tipjar at the moment.
A 5% fee to sponsor a project seems a little excessive. I'm still a top sponsor on <a href="http://coingiving.com/" rel="nofollow">http://coingiving.com/</a>
So could I add comments from junk accounts and earn $4 in bitcoin? I'm not sure I'm following the logic here... and what prevents highly unethical behavior.
sferik has a commit for each day over the past year:<p><a href="https://github.com/sferik" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sferik</a><p>It's the first time I see a full year streak!
maybe tips per number of lines changed would be a fairer benchmark than tips per commit. I guess that would still cause a bunch of unnecessary line changes.<p>I really don't think this kind of financial incentives are good for open source projects.