This article fails on two basic points:<p>1. The fees can be collected on transfers which occur between two members of the network without funds leaving the wallet. That's clearly the long-term goal of any network -- to grow to the point where everybody is on it.<p>2. The stated goal of ChangeTip, as seen in their videos and materials, is to replace advertising and other indirect ways of monetizing content with a way to directly express support for creators.<p>Advertising is a model whereby content creators get vanishingly small amounts of money for views, while having to place their content next to third-party claims and pitches which they do not endorse. Historically this has been because the rates on payment processing have dwarfed the actual value that a single article or video view delivers to a single consumer, so asking for half a penny was not feasible. You can express that level of support with BTC however.
Oh, it's that guy that hates everything.<p>ChangeTip is <i>cool</i>. It is a Bitcoin killer app. Like it or not, <i>giving</i> tips, even to people who don't need them, is fun. And for every person who is tipped who may not want or need it, I've seen some kid who is quite happy as they realise they've just been gifted something worth a few dollars. And then their journey into Bitcoin begins as they try to figure out how to actually spend it.
It's hard to argue against tip bots if you look at Dogecoin. Everything charitable, everything unique, everything that got them in the news was because they nailed tipping.
Most tips I see are not "fractions of a penny" but rather the standard seems to be 1000 bits which is like 32 cents. I often see people tip a dollar or more.<p>Secondly, I can never understand why some people get so offended by someone giving them a small amount of money. When you go to the coffee shop to buy a $2.40 coffee and are given $0.60 in change are you insulted by the cashier for thinking you needed that 60 cents?
> last month's craze in the Bitcoin world, a new service for tipping people online, called ChangeTip.<p>It's not new. I's been around for a while.