EthCC 2: Kendall Cole

yes go ahead and get started so my name is Kendall and I'm here to talk to you a little bit about tipping which i think is actually a really awesome onboarding experience for Krypto and also one of the oldest used uses we have for it so in the beginning we had Bitcoin as I'm sure many of you know and so Bitcoin when it first came out the way people would just you know send each other Bitcoin is they would just post their address somewhere kind of like this on Bitcoin talk and send each other crypto and so what makes it a tip versus just an exchange is kind of sending some some money to somebody you don't know for something they did on the internet that you kind of like and yeah this this actually took often like became pretty successful and in some cases these donations and tips could be quite large this is one - Andreas Antonopoulos for well one of the tips there was five hundred thousand dollars and the total was 1.3 million so pretty substantial so after this just people sending each other money by exchanging addresses sorry one more thing yeah so what was cool about this address exchange that it's simple and non-custodial it's just sent each other money basic use case of Bitcoin it's not quite as good as this potentially D anonymizing but you know it's people choosing to do so so it's kind of fun when things get interesting is when we have this cool application called change tip that came out in about 2013 and so this was a reddit tip bot that basically allows you to mention the change tip user name along with on a comment that someone had someone had created and you could tip them a dollar or a beer which would just convert into whatever like the current exchange there it was and you send the money and so we're this like really changed the game a little bit is that you could tip users that didn't yet have an address why this is cool is that you could on board people - Bitcoin that did not yet really know anything about it they didn't have to input their address at first you could just send it to the reddit username and when they were ready - they could go in and to their address and with all their money what was not so good about it is that it was custodial so what you have to do to use changetip is you if you wanted to tip someone you had to send money to the change chip address giving them custody of it and then if you wanted to withdraw you to draw with him change tip address so they until you did that they had custody of it for a change tips case this was not so bad but as we'll see in a few minutes it's not ideal so here's a few more examples of what change tip looks like I was also available on Facebook YouTube and Twitter so they tried to have a little bit of coverage there and got a decent amount of traction a hundred thousand plus users $350,000 three hundred thousand individual tips and they even raised three and a half million dollars I think ultimately raising money it was probably where they went wrong because they weren't able to really come up with like a VC sustainable type of business out of this and eventually they went bust now when they went bust they did the right thing and they actually allowed all of the users to withdraw their money which is about the best thing that custodial trust the party going in a business could do so where things really get interesting is when does coin enters the scene so we have what's called Doge tip bot which was very similar to this to this change to a bot but for dogecoin and they entered around 2014 so the total this is actually these numbers are from 2014 so a bit early $150,000 worth of tips remember that ders coin is usually worth fractions of a cent for per dose coin so pretty substantial given that 60000 users and now was in 2014 so they ran for several more years probably could have been quite a bit more than this and they really propped up the entire community like the entire dos daquiris community was tipping each other sending each other Doge and I mean I really like created a little ecosystem here which is pretty awesome now where things went wrong is when the creator of this does tip bot well he tried to also create a company like changetip did raise a little bit of money things didn't go so well he ended up sort of dipping into the money he was custody for his for his users in order to pay some of these expenses and was just trying to like you know essentially hold up this charade for a while and eventually he just grew tired of it was tired of trying to you know like refill this this like little pot but he had drawn from him the he basically had a deficit on and he said guys I'm done going home I'm gonna take all the money that's left in there to pay what it like what I'll say in the expense I have and sorry and yeah basically stole somewhere between nine and nine hundred thousand dollars depending on what the price of dose was at the time from his users kind of the problem with custodial custodial operations and now it's dead as I mentioned so yeah enter the ether in 2017 with tip jar there's really following the same trend I thought I'd mention it because you know it's ether and it's actually still going one of the few that's still going very similar to the other reddit tip BOTS also custodial but you know if you don't shut down if you actually continue around the operation it's it's it's okay you know it's just that's sort of the risk so these guys make up what I would think of as like the first class of the tip BOTS from around 2009/2010 until 2017 quite a bit of users 200,000 not bad especially in this ecosystem I mean this is you know a real use case with a real not insignificant number of users it was kind of the first basic use of these currencies you're just sending and receiving Bitcoin ether endures the problem is that the bots are custodial and users have been burned you know this was the the worst possible outcome that happen and it did happen so that is the risk and then sort of the downside to the direct transfer tips so they were require prior onboarding so you could say hey I really want to send you some Bitcoin and then you have to explain to that person how they can actually receive that Bitcoin and because it's not going to show up the second that you do it that you then have to then tip them it's sort of this like synchronous exchange that's not quite ideal so where are things things start to get interesting is around 2018 enter the Lightning Network and Tippin so Tippin some of you have probably seen it's gotten a lot of hype pretty recently and it's really cool it's a Chrome extension you download it adds this little this little lightning bolt on to like a tweet that someone sends you click it and then you get like their link to basically send them a tip it even got some attention from our man Jack Dorsey who's been hyping up a lot of products recently but you know the fact that he's excited about is exciting maybe he'll add this thing to Twitter it's pretty cool so what is this Lau well cheap transactions of lightning in the instant finality that she gets where things are a little bit mixed you know requires a Chrome extension I'll put that in orange that don't think that's a night user experience but it does give this kind of native feel that's pretty cool it requires a lighting enabled wallet and I think here's where it really starts to fall off I mean yes this is what you need if you want to use lightning but it's a lot of work to get set up with a lighting enabled wad right now try to myself you know you either have to set up your own use one of the existing solutions but you kind of have to dig for them it's not it's not super straightforward and where it really falls I think is that you have to sign up to receive tips so it's still really cool I'm sure that these guys will add the ability to tip someone who has not yet entered an address but it kind of pulls away from the onboarding experience so one of my favorite projects that recently came out is send crypto BOTS also started in sort of late 2018 and started in a pickups team here in 2019 they really just took on like the changetip model for for Twitter maybe the experience super simple you don't need a Chrome extension you just add send crypto at whoever you want to tip and then the amount you want to tip and then as you can see here in this little gif you will get a direct message you enter your address they'll get the same direct message they enter their address you get a link you send them the money using request network which gives you access to a few different years see 20 tokens it's available on reddit twitter and also slack and it doesn't your chrome extension it's completely non-custodial which I love which is very important you can tip without having to set up any kind of account which is really nice and again the same for the user although it doesn't really give them the onboarding and it uses X die it's in beta but it's really cool and everyone's excited about that and I think it's gonna improve the UX so this is where we sort of have this is where like the state of tipping is and I want to talk a little bit about what's next and where I think we could go and why I think this is so powerful so the most important thing for this as an onboarding experience is that you can receive tips without having an existing account you need some online presence that can be tipped without having you anywhere in this ecosystem so that you can basically go in whenever it like whenever it sort of fits your leisure but most importantly there's actually if I say five dollars worth of a tip that's sitting there waiting for you like that's a quite a good incentive to actually get you to go in and take custody onboarding is really the key here this is about onboarding people through the ecosystem the reason that I include this image of the burner wallet is because I think it's a great all morning experience and it's really optimizing for the right thing which is the minimal number of steps in order for you to receive crypto I think the combination of sort of like the Twitter tipping with the burner all it could be really really powerful and then this is where we really need to go next is getting these users who have just received a tip to tip somebody else because that's demonstrating like the - you know most important sort of aspects here sending and receiving crypto and I think if we can get users to do both then we can really really make a difference here and like get more people involved in the ecosystem and end up getting a little bit of dye on everyone's browser I think that's really the goal here because once there's a little bit of dye in people's browser they can start using daps buying crypto Kitty's using the different defy products that are out there and like this is really I think gonna be a big boon for the onboarding experience and after we do that we can go native but not quite like this so this is an example of a reddit sort of beta tester game where you can tip users real money on reddit but they're just using regular occurance regular fiat currency and they require like they do use stripe to process so they're gonna be taking a bit of a fee there it's not ideal it's not the ideal experience I think we can do a lot better a little more like this which is an example of sent know if you guys have seen this really cool website where you can kind of seed slash tip people for the content that they create using either much better experience or also one of my favorites this is PIPA has Native tipping now and it works great and most importantly we need to make it cross-platform so once like we don't want there to be this experience that's intrinsic to just one website the tipping experience should be pretty seamless across the web and quite standardized yeah so yeah that's pretty much all I had I recommend you go tip someone specifically someone that doesn't yet have any crypto because I think it's gonna be a great way to incentivize them to join the ecosystem Thanks yeah not sure this yeah if anyone has any questions happy to in the case of each day you should the page why don't we have to have an account to receive the the tip you say to have an account oh so you don't have to you have to create an account but you can receive an account or you can like we sort of receive the tip before you create an account so you could tip someone twitter address and they can authenticate with Twitter to receive and then enter an address or create one to receive it okay so the Twitter actually will be the way to authenticate yes yes so Twitter in that case would be the way to authenticate and to get the private to claim the tip yeah so you would need to sign in with your Twitter account to basically say like I control this Twitter account and then you would enter like give your public your public address or what I'm suggesting would be a better experience is then if you don't have a public address you could just create a burner wallet and ideally in one step create and then fill that burner wallet like receive the tip to that wallet okay cool thanks guys [Applause]