One of the most promising use cases for Bitcoin is micropayments. And one of the most promising use cases for micropayments is funding content. There are two primary ideas for how to do this with micropayments.
1) A paywall that requires a tiny micropayment to read something (like a penny or less).
2) A tip mechanism. Think of a facebook like or a twitter star with money attached.
We are testing out the latter on AVC starting today. Our portfolio company Coinbase launched a tip button today.
You will notice a tip icon at the bottom of this post (and every post at AVC). If you click on that tip icon, you will see this dialog box:
For those that don’t know, CSNYC is a non-profit I helped to start that is bringing computer science education to the NYC public school system. They will be the beneficiary of all tipping here at AVC.
300 “bits” is 0.0003 bitcoin, or roughy 10 cents. If you are logged into Coinbase on the web or on your phone, you will see the option to use Coinbase wallet to send the money. If you are not, you can type in a bitcoin wallet address and send the money. If you enable one click tip, you will send 300 bits every time you click on the tip button. You can also do this on William’s blog.
Since not all AVC readers have Coinbase wallets or own Bitcoin, we are doing a Bitcoin giveaway today on AVC to jumpstart the bitcoin tipping thing. We will give away $10 in bitcoin to the first 200 people to raise their hands, virtually, for this giveaway.
Here’s how the AVC Bitcoin Giveaway works:
Please don’t send that email if you don’t think you will go through this entire flow as you’ll be taking one of the 200 spots.
I think that’s all there is to say about this right now. Let’s see how this goes. Should be an interesting experiment. Here are some other blogs you can tip at today:
