Changetip is an awesome tool that is used to give money to anyone else via a variety of social media methods. The current mediums that Changetip supports are Github, Google Plus, Reddit, StockTwits, Tumblr, Twitter and YouTube (Facebook coming soon), with a brief and concise explanation on how to tip to anyone you wish via each medium.
You can even send and receive tips directly via the tipme page; an example is, http://your.name.tip.me, which is a much friendlier on the eyes way to provide someone your bitcoin address. One of the brilliant things about Changetip is the ease of which a user can sign into their Changetip account, with just a simple click a user can login via any of their various social media accounts (as listed above), and can even re-log in to a different medium under a different name within a matter of seconds.
Personally I think Changetip is still a very unrealised tool. It can be a relative technical challenge for individuals new to the digital currency space to learn about wallets, then to download a wallet, synch it up and start using it to send and receive.
One of the measures we can use to show the increased interest in Changetip is Google trends. Trend shows the interest in change tip from May (2014) as a steady phenomena for the last half year, until suddenly, we can see that at the end of October there has been a massive increase in interest.
Whether this trend will continue will be an interesting one to watch, for social factors as well as what is an excellent tool to introduce people to digital currencies. This trend coincidentally coincides with the increase in value of bitcoin over the last couple of weeks; how related is this? We can only guess at this time.
In time retrospective analysis may yield interesting information on the correlation of changetip to bitcoin and digital currency adoption.
One of the most interesting things I find about Changetip is that it provides a variety of ‘wallets’ for each of your social media accounts and makes it far easier to send and receive by changing the need to copy/paste a long bitcoin (or similar digital currency) address, replacing it with the simple /u/changetip or @changetip short codes.
You could look at this in a comparative way by comparing early email to the ease of email account creation today and the ease of how you can send and receive email now.
Changetip is the first transition from using full addresses to short code. They have broken the mold; what will follow?
With the increase in tipping the interest in changetip can also be seen via the Changetip reddit page. The last two weeks have erupted in a deluge of messages, questions, interest and more. You can view others’ queries or post your own here, the Changetip team is very responsive.
One of the questions I personally find intriguing and that may lead to even greater adoption would be ‘Changetip integration into gaming‘, which could potentially lead a new surge in tipping and digital currency adoption as individuals are able to tip each other.
And as the interest and adoption of Changetip into the community’s everyday internet life expands so does its reach into the non-bitcoiner community, just as the ease of simple to use email systems grew exponentially, how will an already exponentially growth system such as Changetip grow upon an already exponential growth technology (bitcoin)?
The continued interest and trend towards Changetip is already viewable by a few days’ difference viewing on Google trends. Noticeably the trending has nearly gone vertical. Considering Christmas is barely a month away, and is often known as the season of giving, it should be rather interesting to observe how the continued usage of Changetip coincides with the season and how this correlates with the adoption of bitcoin.
It would be a fairly reasonable suggestion that adoption of bitcoin (for those that do investigate further) would occur a certain time after receiving their first tips, so the question arises, with such a huge surge of interest in Changetip, what follows around the corner for bitcoin?
