When we started ChangeTip a little over 2 years ago, we had a vision for a company that would allow people to spread appreciation on the web for things they enjoyed. It feels good to be appreciated, and ChangeTip aimed to make that possible all over the web.

Since then, over 100,000 people have signed up for ChangeTip, and more than 350,000 tips have been sent. We gave the Bitcoin movement a good boost, and we’re honored to have been the ‘first bitcoin wallet’ for so many people.

In the spring of 2016, ChangeTip’s employees were acqui-hired by Airbnb, where most of us work today. Since then, we’ve been searching for the best outcome for ChangeTip, and unfortunately the only remaining option is to shut it down.

At the end of November 2016, all tipping functionality will be deactivated, and the site will be put into withdrawal-only mode for people to collect their funds. The site will remain up for a number of months to allow users to withdraw their funds, and we will be reaching out to users to notify them.

We recommend you close your ChangeTip account. You may withdraw any remaining funds via BTC withdrawal, or you can donate your funds to Charity when you close your account from the settings page.

FAQ

1. Wait! Can’t you keep it running by doing x or y or z? We’ve explored dozens of options thoroughly over the past few months, and came up empty. It’s time. Among other complications, the monthly costs to maintain the servers, services, and customer support to keep the site running are not insignificant. Furthermore, the potential legal liabilities that may arise make a volunteer effort unappealing.

2. What happens to my money? We want you to have it! The site will be up in a withdrawal-only mode for you to log in and withdraw the funds. If you don’t want it, you can donate it to charity when you close your account.

3. How long do withdrawals take? We process withdrawals in batches, usually within 24 hours. If you’re still waiting after that, feel free to send us an email.

4. What about my USD? Withdrawal as USD has been unavailable for a few months. However, you may convert your USD to bitcoin and withdraw it.

5. What happens to my data? When you log-in, you will have the option of closing your account, at which point we will delete all the social data.

6. Are you making money off this closure in any way? No. In fact, we have been working for free for quite some time to keep the site running.

7. How long will you keep the site up? For a reasonable amount of time, probably a couple months. We have a lot of work to do to contact users to let them know to come to the site and get their money. If you have friends or family who use ChangeTip, please help spread us the word.

8. What if I have another question? Ask below, and we will try to get it answered.

We want to extend a very special thanks to our entire community. We are truly humbled by your generosity and your philanthropic spirit. It was a great adventure, and we’re proud of what we built - we sincerely hope you enjoyed using ChangeTip. Please continue to spread the mission of generosity, gratitude, and appreciation all over the web.

This thread is designed to assist newer members and reward older members, please try to not abuse it by creating new accounts (Will be checking accounts) - Thanks! :D

THIS GIVEAWAY THREAD WILL REMAIN OPEN INDEFINITELY

This is it. This is the killer app. Not only are tips the new more meaningful version of upvotes, they work across the whole Internet!

Get uptipping!

...and we're very lucky to have him.

Disclaimer: I love changetip and think micropayments and tipping are the future of monetizing online content.

[OPINION]

The whole site is just badly designed and confusing. Everything about it down to the font and logo. The front page should be simple and inviting and informative. "what the hell is change tip" Don't go into the whole bitcoin rabbit hole. Just give the essentials. Most people going there will be confused and need to be reassured immediately.

Think about it:

Alarm Bell 1) some anonymous internet person is trying to give you money

Alarm Bell 2) as soon as you get to the site it wants you to connect all your social media

Alarm Bell 3) Bitcoin. Everyone that doesn't know it well thinks it's dodgy.

There's NO WAY I'm siging up to collect 1 dollar. If it's more than 1 dollar I'm probably going to be even more suspicious. If I can't be reassured that it's legit immeadiantly I'm the hell outta there.

The whole site and branding should be re-done from scratch. The user experience has to be SMOOTH, SIMPLE, REASSURING, MODERN Have a look at Circle. They're the best at it so far.

YES, I know this costs money and takes time. Time and money well spent.

Anyone else see where I'm coming from?

We recently received some feedback about our terms and privacy policy. We listened, and we've made changes. Quite frankly, we screwed up, but we've tried hard to fix it. We appreciate the candor of the reddit community and the resulting improvements to our privacy policy.

First, some important facts about ChangeTip and our ethos. When I saw the original bitcointip bot several months ago, I was inspired. I set off to enable tipping all over the Internet; with the following goals:

• Uplift the spirit of generosity and giving online. Make giving money to strangers fun. Reddit’s culture of giving gold was also an inspiration here.

• Drive the mass consumer adoption of Bitcoin, by reducing friction on micro payments and highlighting some good use cases of Bitcoin

• Reward good content on the Internet - The current reward structure on the internet encourages click bait and has saturated the web with ads, pop-ups, and low-quality content, and privacy-compromising 3rd party tags. We want to disrupt that by enabling a micropayment infrastructure for the web that makes it easy for people to reward good content. This is why we call it a Love Button for the Internet

A Strong Advocate for Privacy and Consumer Choice

I have a long history of advocating for privacy on the internet. I have:

• Built a pixel blocking technology that prevents advertisers from gathering data from users illegitimately

• Built a product that monitors ads for site owners so they can know who the "bad actors" are; the ones selling data without the our permission

• Built a Firefox plugin (like Ghostery) that allows for users to see where pixels are being dropped and user data is being compromised

• Participated in privacy hackathons and worked with privacy experts in the industry to promote transparency, control, and choice for users so we know where our data is going online.

• Helped inform the original Do Not Track specification. I have championed implementation at two different companies.

A note for Former bitcointip users

ChangeTip was not built “as a replacement for bitcointip”, but /u/NerdFighterSean, the author of bitcointip, liked what we did so much that he wanted bitcointip users use it instead. Former bitcointip users should view ChangeTip as an option among several alternatives.

ChangeTip was built from the ground up to work across multiple sites, using the login-as feature of those sites to streamline the experience. As such, we maintain links to all of your accounts where you want to send and receive tips. You are in complete control over which accounts you decide to link. If you prefer to keep your tipping confined entirely to reddit, you are free to do so.

Updated Privacy Policy and Terms

The new version of the privacy policy is available for preview, and will go into effect April 14th. We believe it is a drastic improvement for ChangeTip users.

Notable changes that were a direct result of the feedback:

• The personal data section was rewritten. The short version - You are in control of your ChangeTip data, and we aren’t selling it. We never intended to sell it. The privacy policy was worded generically, and we’ve updated it to reflect our promise. We have also added a section that explicitly lists what data we get from each site we work with. For reddit, it's just your username.

• We have removed the Inactive Accounts clause. Inactive accounts will remain open. The original intent was a mechanism to deal with users that receive a single $.25 tip, but never do anything with it. Maintaining these types of accounts for inactive users is a burden for us, but we recognize that the freedom to accept tips without having them disappear at a later date is more important.

• The statement about "Do Not Track” support was reversed. We will gladly support Do Not Track if we roll out 3rd party services/widgets.

Why was the privacy policy in such bad shape? I own that. We’re a brand new startup, and we are busy. I made a mistake by not scrutinizing the boilerplate legal text thoroughly. Legal documents are written for what might happen in the future, but the wording was way too permissive and didn't protect ChangeTip users. I regret that, and I'm sorry. Please allow us to re-earn your trust.

Constructive feedback is appreciated.

TL;DR - ChangeTip works differently than bitcointip. We’re a good company, with privacy-centric values, but we had a bad privacy policy that didn't match those values. Thank you for your feedback. We listened and we fixed it.

Happy new year, wishing everyone the best for 2015 :)

Edit, well it now January the 2nd here in UK and I'm struggling to keep my eyes open ! I'm going to call it a day for this post and get to sleep. Hope 2015 turns out to be a fantastic year for you all :)

Giveaway over.

Hi guys, ChangeTip founder here.

Holy cow, what a day. I was up until I couldn't keep my eyes open any more last night keeping things running. Now wake up to a new set of scaling related challenges this morning. Awesome work!

Our systems are good, but we ran into rate limiting problems with reddit.

And now, today, we are running into rate limit problems with Twitter. We've hit our daily limit there. :( We are working to figure out how to fix this.

Thank you for giving us good problems to have!

Update we are in good shape now!

/u/secret_bitcoin_login had the great idea of offering pizza on /r/RandomActsOfPizza through Changetip and /r/FairShareLoans.

Here's the original post, /u/secret_bitcoin_login bought pizza for /u/girlpirate and /u/go1dfish bought pizza for /u/Catainia.

So how'd we buy them the pizza? There's a great website, pizzaforcoins.com, that lets you order pizza with bitcoin!

We just bought pizza for two people without knowing their address, email, or even their order. They never used bitcoin before, but they were able to buy pizza with it their first time.

This is what makes Changetip great. It's simple enough for anyone to use it, but powerful enough to buy a pizza in a few seconds.

/u/Catainia's cat walking on her pizza, we should see /u/girlpirate's snakes eating her pizza soon!

EDIT: Top level comments count as a reply, so there are plenty left.

EDIT 2: We're currently at 75, but I'm off to bed. Will tip the remaining 25 when I wake up.

EDIT 3: Just woke up. 10 to go!

EDIT 4: Well, I lost count and went over 100, but that just about wraps this up. Thanks for replying and helping spread the word of bitcoin, guys! If you didn't get one, there's plenty of other kind souls on Reddit who hold these type of things, so I'm sure you'll find another one around. This is my first time doing this, but not my last. ;)

This thread is designed to assist newer members - please note this is limited to redditors with 30+ day old accounts and a minimum of 100 link karma - Thanks! :D

THIS GIVEAWAY THREAD WILL REMAIN OPEN INDEFINITELY

We listened to what people were saying about the way the bot works, and we've made a few improvements.

• A lot of folks didn't like that the bot responded to the tip after the user collected. They seemed to think that the bot wasn't working, or that it was very slow. In reality, it was that we were only displaying the confirmation when the user collected the tip. We changed this, so it responds right away, and then updates the response when the user collects the tip.

• Some folks complained that there were too many notifications going to the inbox. We've reduced this to the minimum by removing /u/ prefixes where it made sense, removing redundant notifications.

• We've updated the messages with better wording, and some additional links for new users on their first tip, pointing to /r/bitcoin for Bitcoin information, and the /r/changetip/wiki/

As you may have heard by now, ChangeTip rolled out support for tipping with US Dollars. That’s right, you have a USD Pocket now to tip with. More information on how that works here.

We're very excited to be adding this additional payment channel for our users. It will allow more people to use ChangeTip, and to help spread the adoption of Bitcoin by infiltrating the USD market and building bridges (more on that below).

While this news will be welcomed by the vast majority of our users, we understand that some people may have questions about why we did this. I wanted to take this opportunity to transparently talk about our reasoning, as well as give a glimpse into the ChangeTip’s future plans when it comes to decentralization.

Why did ChangeTip add support for USD?

While the whole ChangeTip team wants to shout from the rooftops that Bitcoin is the best payment channel for micropayments, we also listen to our customers.

On that front, our customers told us that they want US Dollars. We had some hunches on this, and then did some customer interviews, and also did a nationwide survey. In this survey, 76% of people would not use ChangeTip because it was bitcoin. Ouch!

Digging into The Why uncovered a pretty big consumer perception problem with Bitcoin. There were three fairly equally weighted reasons:

• It's not “real money”.

  • This is a short term issue that can be handled with more education. As a community, we have a lot of work to do.

• It's too volatile.

  • I personally think this has become a lazy way to dismiss bitcoin, and further, it doesn't really apply to micropayments as much, but it’s still what people are thinking.

• I don't trust Bitcoin

  • This is the real challenge. The association with drugs, extortion, etc really hurts adoption.

With 3 out of 4 people being unwilling to use ChangeTip because it is using Bitcoin, it was clear that we needed to add USD. The US dollar is probably going to be around for at least a few more years, so we figured we needed to play nice and interoperate. ;)

When these USD users are using ChangeTip, they will be constantly introduced to the benefits of Bitcoin. Want to send a tip to someone who doesn't have a USD bank account? No problem, we will convert that to Bitcoin for you and get your tip to them. Don't like the high banking fees? Use Bitcoin! Don't like waiting 2 days to get your money? Use Bitcoin! We will be sprinkling BTC advertisements all throughout our product.

What plans does ChangeTip have for Decentralization in the future?

We've been through some serious challenges to get USD to work. The regulatory and banking system challenges have been...an exercise in patience. We're now very motivated to figure out a way to enable these transfers that don't require the use of the existing banking infrastructure (and all the headaches that come with that).

On that front, we've recently renewed our commitment to building a decentralized ChangeTip, where the user controls the funds, and both Bitcoin and USD are supported. There are some huge challenges to doing this. Hats off to Abra, as well as Mycelium / Coinapult, for the paving the way recently.

Beyond the challenges that Abra and Mycelium have recently solved, ChangeTip's situation is more challenging for two big reasons.

1. Micropayments. We are moving small amounts of money, it's not feasible to have a 1/10th of a penny tip or micropayment to a publisher be an on-chain transaction. Payment channels look promising here, with ChangeTip acting as an Oracle, as described here

2. Offline mode. With solutions like Abra and Mycelium, the user always initiates the transaction from the device. Since tipping can be triggered from anywhere (Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, etc.), we need a way to trigger the transaction even when the browser/mobile app is not active.

These and other fun challenges await us, but we’re excited for the challenge. We've pulled some heavy hitters together to begin thinking this through (including Richard Kiss, the author of Pycoin, and other soon-to-be-announced high profile Bitcoin experts). Beginning next week we will be actively exploring all possible solutions. The sooner the better! If you have ideas, we'd love to hear them. If you want to help, get in touch.

We're infiltrating USD, building bridges back to Bitcoin, and grabbing users that would have previously been unapproachable. As a result, we think this will expose more people to Bitcoin by providing a simple, low-risk atmosphere to start learning about cryptocurrency. What we’ve seen in our community expansion efforts so far is that people “get” bitcoin when they start using it. In order to get more people understanding and loving bitcoin, they have to use it. We feel this is the easiest way to draw people in, and show them in real time the benefits of bitcoin vs. FIAT.

We welcome suggestions, questions, and other feedback. I'll personally be online for 1 hour to answer questions (sorry, I have a conference today!), but several members of the ChangeTip team will be dropping by throughout the day to answer questions.

I found some emails where I was tipped ... any chance of recovering those coins?