sida

dang, this is not just to sign up for.

The project is actually fully functional. The link links to the front page, but if you see the top tab, you will both the API documentations and the blockexplorer.

That should already be supported. Are you having issues?

We are about to release a webhook feature which you can register your deposit addresses (you can also set it at a predetermined confirmation count). That way at least you will get notified immediately (so you can confirm it with your customer). although the forwarding is still up to blockchain.info to be timely. Contact us over scott@helloblock.io if you are interested.

Do you mean the HTTP webhook for notifications of transactions?

That is true. I can certainly see that.

If enough developers want support for altcoin. I think that wouldn't too hard to do

Which altcoin would you like to see support for?

Although, given the similarities, if we can probably support all the popular altcoins if we do decide to extend support.

In particular, these endpoints are designed to be used as part of the 'before hook' in your integration tests so that you can start with fresh testnet coins in every test.

We already collect that information about relaying IPs (although you can never really be sure who is the originating IP). We have custom nodes that specifically listen for that information. However, we decided this wasn't useful enough to be included in the versioned API.

Although, we are about to release labs.helloblock API, which will include a bunch of experimental features, including information about IP addresses.

Out of curiosity, what do you plan to use information about IP addresses for?

Glad you brought this up. Prior to building helloblock, I built a couple of other open source apps (tippercoin / sparecoins) which used the blockchain.info API.

There were a few problems that I encountered. Blockchain.info is focused on consumer and their API is structured to back their consumer facing sites. As such, they have no testnet support. This is a deal breaker. Because that means, any integration tests come at a tangible financial cost.

Furthermore, their API has always been a documented internal API rather than a public one. That meant, there is no versioning on the API and they sometimes make breaking changes without deprecation notice. The lack of versioning caused a bit of issues.

And in general, I found the API is set up in a way that is, frankly, a bit strange. For example, instead of a status code of 400 for an client side error, they generate a 200 status code with an error text in the body. That also caused issues for debugging and error handling too.

In the end, the various quirks finally led us to build this API.

"Start ups tend to focus on signups / daily active" when they could be focusing on retention.

Could not agree more. Although retention is indeed very hard to measure, and things like net promoter score seems a bit flaky at best.

I am curious, Does anyone use net promoter score extensively and found it useful?

Bitcoin wasn't even around in 2006.

-- you're making money off the storage of 1000s of people like me running bitcoind

Not making any money actually. Project is open sourced too

-- OP_RETURN

Will probably move on the weekend.

This is actually not possible with this particular system right now. Because you will need to send to particular outputs for messaging.

But if you do it with OP_RETURN then yes, you should be able to do that.

We were aware that some miners did mine OP_RETURN.

We do have plans to move this. We previously decided against because we felt it might take too long for the transaction to get confirmed and wanted to at least wait til there is at least 50% pool market share that mines OP_RETURN.

On second thought, we might move to OP_RETURN in the next week, I will certain evaluate this a bit more tonight.

The backup plan is still to move to OP_RETURN once v0.9 is adopted or more miners start accepting OP_RETURN

Umm, good point. I don't have an answer for that. But considering it will cost you about 60c to store a 100 byte payload, I am not sure what copyright infringment material you can put in there. Probably none.

So for now, I will say I don't feel like this is of a concern

I must say I disagree with you although I do see your point.

I don't believe that people will use the Blockchain for messaging. It will cost you 60c per message. I certainly wouldn't use it for messaging.

I think the implication is being able to use OP_RETURN (which btw does not add to the size of the blockchain because it is immediately provably prunable) and people will be able to attach payload onto a transaction. This will be important for this currency to be far more powerful beyond just sending money around.

Well, This was inspired by the upcoming v0.9 release which makes OP_RETURN (allows you to create immediately prunable output to attach message bytes) a standard transaction output in Bitcoin. And when does get released we will move to use OP_RETURN instead of creating messaging outputs.

So back to your question, do I think this is spammy? No, because this project will never generate enough transactions to matter in the slightest bit to the size of the blockchain. However, I feel the project is important to demonstrate a point which is this:

Bitcoin as a programmable currency protocol has enormous potentials beyond just sending transactions. And OP_RETURN (when it does become standard) has important implications for smart contracts, using Bitcoin transactions to prove / transfer ownership. The objective of this project is to raise awareness in that area. And make developers realise the potential in a fun way on Valentine's Day.

At most, I would say using hash160 output to attach messages is not an elegant way to do this compares when OP_RETURN does become standard. But I believe this awareness that we generate is far more important to Bitcoin development.

hey, that's a good question. Each standard Bitcoin address is a derivation of the 20 bytes `hash160`. This allows us to embed an arbitrary 20 bytes message in each output. When you put together a message, we build and propagation a transaction where your message is matched by the hash160s of the outputs.

You can see more here: http://www.thenoteblock.com/how-it-works

If only HN had a comment streaming API!

PG, time to add some more features to hacker news

The beautiful thing is that tipping real money kind of doesn't feel right. Like, "hey ryan bates, good job on the railscast, here is a dollar"

But, personally, when it is in cryptocurrency it feels very different.

I am so surprised that dogecoin took off! haha

haha nice. We should definitely look into dogecoin. I honestly didn't take dogecoin seriously until we got so many dogecoin requests today!

Have you tried, 1 Beer (4 USD worth of BTC) or 1 Internet (1.337 USD worth of BTC) ? :P

http://www.tippercoin.com/#/how-it-works/

I agree.

I also find it's easier to tip Bitcoins. Emotionally, it doesn't feel like I am spending money, and as a recipient it also feels more novel (we got a few donations for some of our other projects). It is almost like a star on github but so much better. Like, "wow, they really like my project". It is very satisfying

There has been a lot of talks on micro-transactions in cryptocurrency. I think there is going to be a long time before a micropayment paywall will become effective. Not enough people have bitcoins.

I believe though that micropayment could grow out of tipping. When authors like yourself start accepting bitcoin donations, and one day there will be enough donations that someone would think, "oh wait, I don't need to need to spam my users with Google ads anymore."

Personally, I would like to see services like Gary Bernhardt's screencasts to start accepting micropayments in Bitcoin. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog

Yeah, as locksley said you can use coinbase for over the email BTC transfers.

The original intend for building TipperCoin is for tipping and supporting open sourced projects. To send a tip / act of gratitude to people that built cool stuff and that you don't personally know (as opposed to email, which you tend to know them).

A few weeks ago, we built an open sourced browser wallet (www.sparecoins.io) and we posted it on reddit and got a bunch of tips with reddit tip bot. That was very encouraging for me. (The fact that people liked it enough to send us a tip!!) And so we decided to build this tipping service (open sourced, ofc!) to encourage supporting other projects.

what is with these cliffs haha

Good work. 100k transactions? wow! What is your site?

Good work. Pretty cool site.

This is cool: "Our long term goal is to build an open derivative platform that anyone can participate in. "

Not that I don't trust you guys. Is there a way that I can test the site?

bitcoin bubble is destined to pop; soon: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/04/09/176708504/bit...