Earn $4 in bitcoins for any commit to sferik/t, a command-line Twitter tool

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?"

sashazykov5• 13 years ago

No, it's not an MVP. We retrieve new commits using github API.

tobyjsullivan2• 13 years ago

Never judge a book by it's bootstrapped cover, I guess. Hah. That's cool, thanks for the info!

For the record, I thought MVP because I somehow didn't notice all the other projects and thought this was the only one.

joeyh3• 13 years ago

I'd like to drop $500 to $1k for git-annex into tip4commit. This is money that was donated to me in a crowdfunding campaign (http://campaign.joeyh.name/) and set aside to get more people committing to git-annex than just me.

Problem is this: git-annex's website and indeed its BTS are part of its git repository. So it gets lots of commits from eg "name@web". I don't want tip4commit to try to send bitcoin tips to such dummy email addresses.

Is this something your platform can handle? It would be sufficient if the emails you send have to be acted on to take bitcoin out of the tip pool, and it otherwise remains available for the next committer.

sashazykov5• 13 years ago

There are a lot of proofs on bitcointalk and twitter. https://twitter.com/harrigan/status/404255665163481088 for example. The project is online for more than a month.

MBCook• 13 years ago

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.

nkuttler6• 13 years ago

Indeed, my first thought was actually "let's see if there are any whitespace issues to fix".

willbill• 13 years ago

I love how whitespace has turned into an "issue" and how a problem has also turned into an "issue"

shortly• 13 years ago

the solution is probably a moving-knife procedure[1]:

have a list of rewardable issues. grow the reward for each issue with time. once the reward makes the time spent on the project worthwhile, people will be incentivized to commit. they won't let the reward grow too high, for fear that someone else will take it.

you could let coders freeze the reward for some amount of time, and get exclusive rights to claim that reward, until the time expires.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving-knife_procedure

alixaxel• 13 years ago

That is very neat idea!

arsenische13• 13 years ago

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

dysoco• 13 years ago

I didn't know Linux had Bitcoin tips, could have used that.

aram• 13 years ago

sferik has a commit for each day over the past year:

https://github.com/sferik

It's the first time I see a full year streak!

unreal37• 13 years ago

I assume it's not affiliated with the projects at all. This is an independently-run tip system for open source projects. Cool idea.

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.

slg4• 13 years ago

If I am reading it right, the developer of tip4commit will never pay out the full balance since they will only ever pay out 1% of the remaining balance. It almost sounds of this site is just a clever way for their developer to increase their position in bitcoin speculation.

arsenische13• 13 years ago

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.

arsenische13• 13 years ago

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.

FBT• 13 years ago

I am glad you have thought about it it to this extent. It is always reassuring to see that the relevant point have been thought of, and that there is at least a provisional plan to deal with them. This gives me a fair amount more confidence in what you are doing.

JoshTriplett3• 13 years ago

By all means, please do keep taking a percentage as a sensible funding model; it doesn't seem at all unreasonable, and it ensures you'll stick around. I'd be more concerned if you didn't have any obvious revenue stream.

Alternatively, if you do make your site open (and that'd be awesome, please do), you should prominently encourage people to post tips to your repository.

rthomas62• 13 years ago

Some Bitcoin millionaire needs to drop 10 BTC in that donation address, then commits would earn $100 each. That would be interesting to watch.

nailer2• 13 years ago

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?

sp332• 13 years ago

Bitcoin transactions have a fundamental unit which is much smaller than a whole bitcoin. Actually it's 1/100,000,000 XBT! These tiny units are called satoshis, after the creator of the bitcoin protocol.

GeneralMayhem• 13 years ago

The same way that you can send someone part of a dollar. The atomic unit of USD isn't the dollar, it's the cent (setting aside some financial instruments). Likewise, the atomic unit of BTC isn't a bitcoin, it's a satoshi (1 * 10^-8 bitcoin).

The unique number that you're thinking of isn't the bitcoin itself, it's the proof that that value was yours to spend.

ernestipark• 13 years ago

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10897/how-are-par...

jnbiche• 13 years ago

There are really no "Bitcoins", there are only a very long series of inputs and outputs to various Bitcoin addresses, all recorded on the shared block chain. Inputs (Bitcoins) come in to the system through mining, and then they are traded out via outputs and in via inputs.

The smallest value for an input/output is 1 Satoshi. 1 Bitcoin equals 100,000,000 Satoshi. So a Bitcoin is just a convenient measurement of inputs minus outputs.

When you make a purchase from an address, the client adds up your inputs and outputs at that address, and if you have a positive balance, you can send any portion of it as an output to another address (as long as you have the private key to verify that you own the sending address). It is recorded on the block chain as an input to that receiving address records, and the miners (eventually) confirm that transaction by including it in a block -- each time that happens is 1 confirmation (mining is another whole can of worms).

When you make a purchase that is less than the total number of inputs minus outputs at the address you're spending from, you can receive the difference via an input to either the same address or another, new address, depending on the Bitcoin client used.

Does that make sense? It's all just a shared accounting system.

EDIT: Clarified role of block chain.

nailer2• 13 years ago

Thanks to you + all who responded about Satoshis.

fryguy• 13 years ago

A bitcoin doesn't have a unique number at all. The unique number that you are thinking of is effectively an "account id". When bitcoins are mined, essentially a ledger gets created saying that "account id" #1234567343533 has 25.000000000 bitcoins in it. When you send someone money, you say "from #1234567343533, send 0.05000000 BTC to #111111111, and 24.95000000 BTC to #1234567343533"

AbraKdabra• 13 years ago

I somehow read "Earn 4 bitcoins for any commit..." and thought "wow that's really generous", I was like, very wrong haha.

andrewgjohnson2• 13 years ago

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.

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.

Best of luck.

btbuildem• 13 years ago

Especially that the payout is higher for earlier commits, and easy fruit gets picked first.. chances are the hard bugs would not get fixed (or to be an optimist: this would identify what the hard bugs are) and the owner could put an explicit bounty on each of those.

arsenische13• 13 years ago

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.

andrewgjohnson2• 13 years ago

I think your assumptions are incorrect.

olouv2• 13 years ago

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!

edavis2• 13 years ago

Projects like these is where Bitcoin can really shine.

Maybe Bitcoin will conquer the world, maybe it won't. I have no idea.

What I do know is there is real utility in being "electronic petty cash" which Bitcoin can easily become.

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.

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.

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.

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?

gamegoblin• 13 years ago

What you describe kind of sounds like a universal karma system (yay internet points!). As stackoverflow and similar sites have shown, people will do quite a lot to accumulate internet points.

agravier• 13 years ago

Not really. You can't purchase karma. Or rather: karma that you could purchase with dollars and use to gratify someone or incentives a task would be akin to a specialised currency.

Or: money is tradable karma.

slg4• 13 years ago

What is preventing USD from being used in this way? It seems to me to only stumbling block are regulatory and security restrictions. If that is the case, wouldn't future bitcoin regulation put an end to this type of use case?

Or is the real benefit of your proposed use case the distance of bitcoin value from perceived financial value (ie you are willing to tip X bitcoin but have second thoughts when looking it as X cents)?

olalonde2• 13 years ago

It's fairly easy to send USD online if you own a credit card and bank account, but receiving money is a whole lot harder. It's also harder to do it with the degree of anonymity that Bitcoin provides and without the risk of your payment provider freezing your funds or banning you from using their service.

Smirnoff2• 13 years ago

Micropayments is a really tough business. Basically it's too risky. Chargebacks are often anywhere between $15 to $35 per transaction.

When you earn a small percentage of a $5 transaction, which a sender claims to have sent by mistake (or he/she requests the money back due to different reasons) 2 things happen:

A. You lose your % of $5

B. You get charged $35.

Not a pretty situation to be in when you are scaling and about 15-30% of your sales get charged back.

Bitcoins are irreversible, so at least they mitigate your risk as a micropayment provider (or as a seller).

baddox2• 13 years ago

It seems to me to only stumbling block are regulatory and security restrictions.

That's correct, but those are humongous only's.

If that is the case, wouldn't future bitcoin regulation put an end to this type of use case?

Short of large-scale Internet traffic examination, the only thing regulations can hope to do is restrict the exit points: the exchanges between Bitcoin and some government-controlled currency.

rthomas62• 13 years ago

Someone on Reddit made a bot that implements this functionality site-wide. You can say "+/u/bitcointip @Username $1" in a comment or message, and the bot will send $1 worth of bitcoins out of your balance to that user. If they don't have a Reddit Bitcoin wallet, it creates one when they get sent coins. The bot also has denominations of beer ($3.64), coffee ($1.38), and internet ($0.25).

edavis2• 13 years ago

Yeah, /u/bitcointip is a great example of what I'm talking about.

Though I do wonder how the more vocal Bitcoin supporters would react if the project never grew beyond "electronic petty cash," even if it was successful at being that (i.e., widely used and easy to set up).

My worry is if Bitcoin "fails" in its larger goals (e.g., challenging the USD's global domination), it'll be seen as a failed project which will keep it from even being able to accomplish its smaller, more manageable goals.

bearbin• 13 years ago

MCServer, a FOSS Minecraft server is also on here: http://tip4commit.com/projects/74

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.

tinco3• 13 years ago

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.

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.

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?

So, nice idea, but please make sure this is actually going to be safe.

(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)

slg4• 13 years ago

If only there was some party out there that could protect us from things like this. Possibly even insuring us in the case of something going really wrong and the person holding our money loses it all. They could also establish rules that anyone holding money would have to comply with in order to be certified as safe. Wouldn't that be grand...

tinco3• 13 years ago

It would be grand indeed. It would even be more grand if a small project like this would be able to partake in that party's service without paying thousands of dollars for audits, registration fees, insurance fees and such.

But perhaps it would be more grand if that expensive and bureaucratic third party could just be avoided with a smart technical solution :)

glomph• 13 years ago

Escrow is only really viable if you know the future recipient or if you can depend on the sender to return to approve transactions. Seems difficult to fit it to this type of situation.

arsenische13• 13 years ago

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)

lcasela• 13 years ago

This is a really good idea! It really adds an incentive to contributing.(Though I can see a lot of people abusing this.)

arsenische13• 13 years ago

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

sferik2• 13 years ago

The problem with this funding model is that it encourages fluff pull requests, such as this one: https://github.com/sferik/t/pull/138/files.

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.

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.

1qaz2wsx3edc• 13 years ago

I don't know. I find gittip's model mostly rewards popular coders.

Where as tip4commit, rewards are not influence by popularity. I do see how fluff pulls could drain the pool. One needs to ask: Is changing a typo worth $4 dollars? Is it worth my time to do it? Maybe I should just click that merge button.

In my opinion bountysource is the best reward system, as it gives context, popularity is a boon, and it shouldn't generate fluff.

Just my two cents.

japhyr• 13 years ago

Gittip is certainly going to help more popular coders at first. But that's true with any platform in its early growth phase.

When Gittip is more well-established, anyone who wants to should be able to put a "Gittip button" on their project page. When Gittip itself has more name recognition, an unknown coder who creates a widely-used project should be able to rapidly pick up meaningful support through Gittip.

alxndr3• 13 years ago

What if the merger were able to modify the tip amount?

A project could have a standard of, say, 0.5% for typo fixes, 1% for documentation, 2% for refactoring which improves Code Climate or coverage statistics...

arsenische13• 13 years ago

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!

arsenische13• 13 years ago

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.

oneeyedpigeon• 13 years ago

You don’t know that the PR was submitted with any knowledge of tip4commit. Would you accept the commit normally? Do you want the very existence of tip4commit to modify your project management? My advice: act as if tip4commit doesn’t exist; they’re just providing a service on the side which you shouldn’t need to worry about.

Skoofoo• 13 years ago

People have an economic incentive to pick the low-hanging fruit, but eventually there will be none left.

Personally, I wouldn't mind accepting something like that for my own open source project. It takes time to proofread, and I appreciate spotless grammar.

stormbrew• 13 years ago

What if this kind of routine trivial fix is exactly the sort that needs to be incentivized to actually happen? This is perhaps an extreme example, but it's also the sort of thing that is both common and vaguely unappealing about open source projects. Everyone's excited to do the big important next feature or blatant bug fix, but no one really wants to do the janitorial cleanup.

sferik2• 13 years ago

This is getting ridiculous:

https://github.com/sferik/t/pull/142/files

https://github.com/sferik/t/pull/143/files

https://github.com/sferik/t/pull/144/files

Shameless.

imdsm• 13 years ago

It was to be expected.

athaeryn• 13 years ago

Hey there, that last commit is mine. I won't be getting a tip for it, I just thought it was a nice change. The first thing I usually look for with a tool like this is how to install it, so I moved the Ruby installation steps down to the bottom so as not to bury what I thought was the important bit in the Installation section. Poorly-timed, if anything.

SwellJoe• 13 years ago

While I love to get documentation updates, the comma thing and semi-colon thing is ridiculous, and in the comma case is less correct in this context. The doc re-org isn't a bad thing, though.

But, I also suspect that once there are lots of projects that have this feature, and the maintainers establish that they won't merge non-useful commits, like grammar nitpickery (though good grammar has value, and we merge stuff that fixes grammar in our docs, and I wouldn't mind having people get paid for it) this would become less common. And, reputation still matters. I wouldn't want to be "that guy" (and I wouldn't want to hire that guy for substantial work) that takes advantage of a simplistic system to get paid.

baddox2• 13 years ago

I have submitted similar pull requests to open source projects with no financial incentive. I don't really see the problem, as long as it's judged to be a "legitimate" correction.

alxndr3• 13 years ago

All projects on tip4commit, conveniently sorted by tipjar size desc: http://tip4commit.com/projects

Only 15 projects with a nonzero tipjar at the moment.

mnem• 13 years ago

Somehow reminded of the bug bounty dilbert cartoon: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/

olouv2• 13 years ago

Got a tip putting the tip4commit link in the readme...! http://tip4commit.com/projects/143

Not sure this is intended behavior.

Shouldn't the owner of repositories be out of scope (or at least make it configurable)? tipping myself minus the commission is no fun ;-).

PS: would make sense to have a signup via github

arsenische13• 13 years ago

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!

tomrod• 13 years ago

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.

Yen• 13 years ago

In order to actually earn the tip, the project mantainer (sferik) has to merge your commit.

If you provide a value-less commit, they'll just ignore it, and you'll get no money.

If you provide a bunch of value-less commits, they'll probably get annoyed.

If you provide a commit worth merging in to the project, they'll likely commit it, and you'll receive the tip.

chrismorgan2• 13 years ago

It looks to me like bors, the integration bot, will be getting all of the mozilla/rust tips: http://tip4commit.com/projects/149.

chrismorgan2• 13 years ago

(Correction: actually only half.)

sashazykov5• 13 years ago

Thanks, we are trying to filter merging commits. I will fix it soon.

pixelcort• 13 years ago

Ooh, what if there was a bot that had some unit tests, and then gave BTC to whomever writes code that passes all those tests?

twodayslate• 13 years ago

A 5% fee to sponsor a project seems a little excessive. I'm still a top sponsor on http://coingiving.com/

ostikk• 13 years ago

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.

I really don't think this kind of financial incentives are good for open source projects.

Mitt• 13 years ago

"Enter GitHub project URL to find or add a project"... Why are they limited to GitHub? Where is support for BitBucket?

sashazykov5• 13 years ago

We will add it later.

zdwolfe• 13 years ago

Is this not what https://www.bountysource.com/ already does?

Earn $4 in bitcoins for any commit to sferik/t, a command-line Twitter tool

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