AutoTip Launches, While Coinbase Bows Out To ChangeTip

Micropayments enable people to sell content on the Internet and could be an alternative to advertising revenue. They were envisioned to involve small fractions of a cent, as little as $0.0001 to a few cents.

The Coinbase Tipping Button allowed users to send small amounts of bitcoin, from a few cents to $50, to content creators that integrated the button on their websites. The product allowed users to send bitcoins straight from their Coinbase accounts with one click. Coinbase stated in a press release that over 10,000 content creators and websites have integrated the button since its launch 3 months ago.

“We wanted to provide a way for our ~1.9M users to tip content creators in one-click and saw a real need for one-click tipping functionality. We’ve been encouraged by the initial response, but we have a long ways to go to making bitcoin micropayments mainstream.”
— – Nick Tomaino, Business Developer at Coinbase

A recent press release stated that Coinbase will cease supporting its Tip Button, as rival ChangeTip has seen wider adoption and growth.

“Another excellent tipping service in the bitcoin community, ChangeTip, has gotten some even better traction, and done a great job at pushing the tipping ecosystem forward. So today we’d like to show our support for them and encourage existing users of our tip button to migrate over to ChangeTip,”- Coinbase

The Coinbase and ChangeTip micropayment solutions differ in numerous ways. Coinbase focused on the potential of micropayments for content creators, ChangeTip on the other hand was user focused, and enables micropayments across a wide variety of platforms.

“We’ve created a system of robots that search for the name ‘ChangeTip’ when mentioned across different social networks. When a robot hears its name, it parses the message and delivers the indicated amount from the sender’s wallet to the receiver’s. ChangeTip uses an internal ledger to process tips off chain, allowing us to offer this service free of charge.”
— – ChangeTip

While Coinbase has bowed out to ChangeTip, AutoTip has released an Open Source solution. The content creator focused solution includes a Google Chrome extension. Content creators need to add a meta tag to the header of HTML document containing the content. Users, with the extension installed, have to option to tip the content creator automatically, or manually.

While both Coinbase and Changetip held funds, providing a centralized service for tipping small amounts, Autotip aims to decentralise the process;

“Autotip is completely decentralized. There is no Autotip account you have to sign up for. All money moving between tipper and tippee is done peer to peer. The only fee associated with an AutoTip is the fee to the bitcoin miners.”
— – AutoTip

AutoTip faces stiff competition following the Coinbase announcement, “At Coinbase, we view our core business as providing bitcoin infrastructure (secure APIs for bitcoin storage, exchange, wallets, and merchant tools). ChangeTip is an excellent example of a company which uses our APIs, and we’d like to support them instead of competing with them,” – Coinbase

Now those blogs and websites, along with the rest of the 10,000 users of Coinbase’s tipping service, will be switching over to ChangeTip, before the service ends officially on April 1st. Over 10,000 Coinbase users will be a huge boost to ChangeTip’s existing 66,000 person strong user base. While AutoTip is just getting started.