ChainTipper - High-Speed Non-Custodial ChainTipping - open Beta

ChainTipper has been in closed Beta for quite a few months and it has matured enough to open the beta up to a larger crowd.

But what is ChainTipper?

Motivation

If you've ever used chaintip on reddit and you're like me, you'll find the process rather cumbersome: after writing a comment mentioning u/chaintip you have to go to your message inbox and copy the recpipient (or relay) address chaintip sends you. (@tibanne (author of chaintip) has recently sped up delivery of this message greatly, so at least there is no waiting time any more, but still: you have to go to the inbox and find that message). Next you whip out your wallet to make the tipping transaction. Your mileage may vary (having to pull up qr code, copy-pasting and whatnot), but this takes more time. Then you can navigate back to the reddit thread and pick up reading.

Idea

Clearly for a real bitcoiner custodial solutions (like we had before with tippr, for example) are not an option.

So I came up with the idea to implement a bot running on my local machine that has some funds. It would connect to my Reddit account, listen for the chaintip messages and then ease (or even fully automate) the process of making the transactions.

Of course the problem with fully automating the payment was how to determine the tip amount. So I remembered the old tipr bot (custodial) that allowed the use of monikers to state the amount to be tipped right in the tipping comment.

Like this:

For this to work my bot would have to be able to read the tipping comment I wrote and at the time there was no way to find the tipping comment given the chaintip message.

So I talked to Tibanne about the idea. He liked it and said he would include a link to the tipping comment into the chaintip message. He promptly implemented that and I was good to go. This was back in March 2021.

This is a good place to thank Tibanne for his openness, willingness to accomodate my bot and also to motivate me to actually implement it.

Execution

So, thanks in part to @georgedonnelly constantly advertising people should build more, I got off my lazy ass and started implementig.

So, I started implementing and once I had a functional version I started looking for beta testers using the following teaser video (it's now aged, but you can still see the workflow):

Closed Beta

This was end of April 2021. With the help of Tibanne I found some great beta-testers for a closed beta.

This is a good place to thank them. Especially Jon F and Remora_101 have been extremely helpful in finding bugs, making suggestions and just generally keeping me motivated to continue working on ChainTipper.

Thank you guys!

Open Beta

This is where YOU come in! Check the resources at the end to find out how to join.

In case you want to check it out, please do yourself a favor and read at least the first part of the manual titled "A note about Safety and Security".

Feature Overview

This is what the current version (beta18) offers:

This is what it can do (and how)

• Will connect to your reddit account, reading chaintip messages from your inbox

• Links itself to a local Electron-Cash wallet to be able to create and broadcast transactions.

• Will try to parse an amount like "u/chaintip 1 beer" (yes, monikers are back!) from the tipping comment that is linked from the chaintip message

• Will determine wether a tip has been paid by looking at the blockchain (so yes, it will detect payments made from other wallets, too)

• Allows to manually pay a bunch of tips.

• Will also automatically pay tips meeting certain criteria (max amount, amount moniker parsed successfully)

• Helps keep your reddit inbox tidy by marking most chaintip-related messages as "read".

And this is what it cannot (yet) do

• Does not allow the user to edit the list of amount monikers (no "u/chaintip 1 myfluffypony" yet)

And this is what it wont ever do

• ChainTipper will never be a reddit client with any kind of broader scope, like something to manage your messages with. All functionallity will be tipping-related and most likely remain rather minimalistic.

Links / Resources

I decided to pass on maintaining a website for ChainTipper, so alle the code and release files (plugin zip file to install into EC) can be found on github:

• github.com/molecular/chaintipper

• github.com/molecular/chaintipper/releases

Also, there's actually a manual:

• github.com/molecular/chaintipper/blob/release/doc/manual/manual.md

To report bugs, make suggestions or just chat, please use one of the following options

• github.com/molecular/chaintipper/issues

• t.me/chaintipper

• reddit.com/r/chaintipper/