25¢ Growth Special

Man, I really really want to see Gittip go big. It would be great. The recent credit card fraud issue was certainly unfortunate.

I don't instinctively think that the $1 minimum was a problem. When Gittip was first mentioned, I asked to be able to give tips without signing in first with Twitter or Github; I have accounts with neither service. For example, you say, "...the number of givers on Gittip is really, really small (279) compared to the number of people who, e.g., are on the Internet (2,450,000,000 [source])...", but you aren't making your service available to everyone on the Internet.

Maybe with the recent fraud problem you'll be forced to stick with requiring Github accounts for tippers (though I don't see how a Twitter account would meaningfully alter the metrics for fraud), but I really wish there were some way for me to just hook my business credit card into your service, point it at some guy on Gittip, and send him money each week, without having to create an account on another service first that I don't need.

I still want to be able to give one-off 'tips' to people. A couple months ago, I wanted to express my gratitude to the creator of the bootstrap-sass project by giving him a not-insignificant amount of money for his work, and was going to do it through Gittip but I was turned off by my inability to make it a one time thing.