ChangeTip CEO Nick Sullivan recently expressed his interests towards decentralizing Bitcoin tipping services to create a better trust-based environment.
The comments came during his interview with Trace Mayer on Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast, where he was being asked about the criticism ChangeTip has faced due to its centralized services. Sullivan however admitted their decision to move towards centralization as “reluctant”, as on-chain transactions will simply be slower and costlier enough to handle the ever-increasing daily trade volumes.
“Ideologically, I’d love for ChangeTip to be a truly decentralized application that performed all of its transactions on the blockchain; in fact, we started out that way,” he said. “We had to go off-chain because we realized that in architectural review there was no way the bitcoin network — at least as it’s conceived today — was going to be able to support the kind of volume that we needed. And then, the transaction fees would be too high.”
He further wondered whether emerging Bitcoin technologies such as sidechains could eclipse the centralization issues among tipping services. “We’re willing to donate resources, and we’re willing to use ChangeTip as a notable first use case,” he added while seeking suggestions from the Bitcoin development community.
At first, such a service will ensure that the transactions are being recorded on a public ledger, but at the same will also be more helpful in complying with the existing features. Sullivan simultaneously also mentioned payment channels as a near-term solution, something that will require users to tip others in small installments while complying with a single large transaction.
Apart from decentralization, ChangeTip was also accused back in December 2014, by an established distributed systems veteran Professor Emin Gün Sirer, over its privacy issues. At that moment, Sullivan had reminded all ChangeTip users of their privacy policies that strictly barres them from selling customers’ data to third parties without their consent.
