Making Featherlight Payments on Telegram and Slack
While making payments with crypto isn’t overly complicated, it still requires a few steps such as starting the wallet app, probably entering a password, scanning the recipient’s QR code, or copy/pasting an address, and eventually confirming the transaction. Besides, the recipient’s address isn’t always known, especially not when you want to send money to a person you mostly interact with on Telegram or Slack.
Turns out, community member ChekaZ had precisely this itch that was bothering him and like so many programmers, he knew a way to scratch that itch and gave the world CoinKit, a bot that allows Telegram, Discord and Slack users to easily move coins from one to another.
Did I say that ChekaZ is a die-hard Feathercoin fan?
From now on, all users of the Official Feathercoin channel (German, Chinese) can use the bot to send Feathercoins to each other . The commands are quite straight forward and begin with a familiar forward slash. A list of all available commands is available with /tiphelp. On Telegram, the first attempt to call the bot will result in a link to the bot that you have to click and then — in the private conversation with the bot — you start it by typing /start.
To customise the bot for you, it’s probably best to start with /changecoin FTC to set the default coin to Feathercoin. To see what coins are supported, the command /coins will give you the answer.
If you’re not fortunate enough to have been tipped by someone else by now, you can use /deposit to see your personal wallet address so you can send coins to yourself for use inside the chat group. Once you have charged your wallet, you can spend the coins using the /tip command which is followed by the username and an amount, so for instance /tip @ChekaZ 5 to tip the author of this awesome tool five Feathercoins.
While most commands are straight forward and do what you expect them to do, I’d like to point out what the command /tip @channel 0.5 does:
Please note that the amount (0.5 in my example) is what you tip each of the most active members, so the total cost of this tip was 4 FTC because the bot knew about eight active members. In theory, this can be well over a hundred active users that you tip, so be careful with channel tips!
If you want to use this bot for another channel, you can do so in the with “Add To Group” on CoinKit’s user details. Please note that you have to promote it to admin in order for it to work.
If you want your favourite coin added to the list of supported coins, you can use the services of Blockcurators GmbH. This is the company that community member ChekaZ set up to distribute this bot (and some other crypto related services that are listed on the website).
