A Decentralized Tip Jar for Every Single Website: WeTipCoins DeTrust
WeTipCoins.com makes it super easy and secure to send micro-donation to every website on the Internet in order to support content creators directly. The intention of this post is to describe how the WeTipCoins DeTrust works and how to claim a tip in case your website got tipped. If you want to read more about the WeTipCoins platform in general, here is the introductory article.
One Billion Websites — One Billion Bitcoin Addresses
The initial goal of the DeTrust is to let every website (URL) accept bitcoins without needing to know anything about the Bitcoin system in the first step. The ultimate goal is to make itself obsolete. This happens when Bitcoin becomes a success for the web, such that every website has its own Bitcoin address already embedded. Then the DeTrust is not needed anymore because websites can directly accept donations without intermediate addresses.
Two Claim Phases
In case a tip was send to a intermediate address, it will stay there for a maximum of 52 weeks or one year total.
- 51 Weeks Claim Phase: During the first phase, the claim phase, the tip waiting on the temporary address can get claimed by the owner (or owners) of the website through inserting their Bitcoin address into the content of the website.
- One Week Reclaim Phase: 51 weeks after the tip gets sent, a one week reclaim phase starts. During this phase the tipper can reclaim his tip and get his bitcoins back in case the tip was not claimed in phase one. There will be an automatic option for reclaiming tips inside the wallet where the user only needs to appear online with his wallet during this time in order to reclaim. It is important that the user appears online so that he can prove that he has still access to the private key of his address.
How to Claim?
Claiming of a tip can be done inside the WeTipCoins Wallet. Just navigate to your website and click ‘claim’.
If you do not want to use Chrome or Chromium you can claim also via API: http://trust.wetipcoins.com/URI_ENCODED_URL/claim (learn here more about how to encode the URL you want to claim).
There will be also very soon a special page where you can claim your tips, too. Also auto-claiming will be enabled for websites which receive a lot of tips.
Reclaiming will become available as soon as the first tips leave phase one.
Fees or Free?
The WeTipCoins De-Trust is completely free to use. It does not charge any fees. We will try to survive only through donations. In case a tip does not get claimed or reclaimed during phase one or two it will be considered as a donation to fund further development of the WeTipCoins platform.
Security through Decentralization
In order to secure the tip jars, a decentralized trust will be created. We call it the DeTrust. It is decentralized because no single entity can access the tip jars on its own. Every time a tip gets claimed, the different entities of the DeTrust need to fetch a copy of the website and look for a valid bitcoin address inside the HTML. If they find a address, they collaborate on creating a transaction from the temporary address to the address of the owner of the website. If multiple addresses are found, the first one gets taken as the lucky one and receives all the coins.
Technically the WeTipCoins Wallet creates the hierarchical-deterministic P2SH addresses offline and does not require any server-calls.
On Executing Javascript
For now, the entities of the DeTrust execute Javascript when they fetch the pages. This will be changed in the near future. The only exception will be that the owner of the website sets a flag inside the <head> of the HTML file, that he explicitly wants execution of Javascript. Some websites do not work without Javascript, thus this flag might be needed for special use-cases. Then by default no Javascript will be executed. Furthermore, there might be other special cases for tipping inside social media for example.
Tip the author of this article bitcoins. You can try out the WeTipCoins Wallet either through sending directly bitcoins to following address, or tipping the URL.
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