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Comment by zmitri | Hacker News Reader

I agree. But it also takes people willing to put their money where their mouth is to do that.

The notion of "free" has spoiled a lot of folks online and made it a tough sell. I run a site that is entirely reader supported, but statistically it's very unlikely you'd just sign up and join, even though you believe ad revenue needs to die.

It's especially tough to do on sites built on user-generated content, because someone could just start a new one that's free and they'd lose their audience.

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I hope we can make tipping website owners easier, for those of us adamant about adblocking. Using my credit card to give a small tip to every website I enjoy is uncomfortable. Sending money to anyone on the internet (no international region locking, no international laws) is what I really want to do with bitcoins.

We strongly considered doing this - especially since most of our writers are in foreign countries - but so far not a single writer has expressed interest and no one from the bitcoin community we reached out to showed much interest.

If you know anyone who would help kick this off/make it worth while, I would love to talk more.

Who's "we"? What organization do you represent?

beaconreader.com

Does Flattr do what you want with regards to enabling tipping small amounts to a website?

Perhaps. Seems to allow bitcoin. Maybe some day we can get rid of the middleman and just send bitcoins directly to each other.

I agree but Flattr does provide an interesting approach. With them you set aside a set amount per month you want to donate. Then when you tip a site it gets a proportion of that amount based on the number of tips you made in the month. This way you cap your total spend per month. You could do this manually of course. Maybe sites could start a system of including a bitcoin address in a file at a common location in the URL space.

Dogecoin is doing a good job positioning itself as the internet tipping currency, as far as I know there isn't a dead-simple way of doing it yet though.

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