ChangeTip

» see changetip.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

ChangeTip made bitcoin small enough to be rude about. You replied to someone on Reddit or Twitter with an amount and a mention of the bot, and a fraction of a cent to a few dollars moved across. The amounts had joke denominations attached, so you could hand over a coffee or a beer instead of a number, which hid the fact that you were performing a cryptocurrency transaction in order to say nice post.

The company was ChangeCoin Inc., founded on 17 December 2013 by Nick Sullivan and funded with a $3.5m seed round. Its bet was that bitcoin's real consumer use would turn out to be social rather than commercial, moving trivial amounts around in places where ordinary payment rails had never gone because the fees made no sense. For a while the bet looked correct.

Tipping of this kind required Reddit and English-language Twitter, and in 2014 neither of those was where Turkish internet argument took place. Crypto did arrive here, heavily, just later and on a completely different motive. The lira kept shedding value and people were looking for somewhere to keep their savings. Turkey now posts some of the highest crypto adoption figures anywhere, built on the opposite impulse to handing a stranger twenty cents for a good comment.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the viral month ~

November 2014 was the peak and it was sudden. Tipping became a minor craze on Reddit, the bot showed up across a handful of other networks, and the counter kept climbing until more than 350,000 tips had passed through the service. The problem with a craze as a business model is that it gives you a user number and not a revenue number, and micro-transactions whose entire appeal is being too small to care about are a poor place to take a cut.

~ the orphan ~

In April 2016 Airbnb acqui-hired a substantial part of the team, including the leadership. Airbnb was unusually explicit about what it was not doing: it stated it had not acquired the company's assets or intellectual property and had no plans to put bitcoin into its own products. It wanted the payments engineers.

That left a working service with hundreds of thousands of users and almost nobody to run it. Over the following months the remaining code and assets tied to the tipping product were shopped around and found no buyer. A consumer bitcoin service in 2016 was a hard sell, which is why the bot kept answering for seven months after its authors had moved to other desks.

~ the withdrawal window ~

The announcement came on 18 November 2016, and tipping stayed on until the 30th, with the site kept up a while longer so balances could be withdrawn. Anything unclaimed was somebody's fraction of a cent. The domain outlived all of it and belongs to other people now: changetip.com currently serves a copy of an encrypted email provider's homepage, carrying assets dated 2026, with nothing on it about bitcoin at all.

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