The Internet is full of great content but unfortunately, most of its creators never get a dime for it. TipIOTA aims to break this limitation and empowers creators across all social media platforms to earn money for great work. TipIOTA Chrome browser extensions is currently in private beta but we are working hard to roll out integrations with as many social media platforms as possible. We have chosen Reddit as our test platform since it encapsulates a thriving and ever-growing IOTA community. Once our plugin is widely tested, we aim to quickly extend our offering to all social media platforms beginning with Facebook, Twitter, Medium and YouTube. Now you can finally be rewarded for adding valuable content to any community. TipIOTA distinguishes itself from similar services by its ease of use and possible expansion over the entire internet.

IOTA is a completely new and innovative distributed ledger technology designed to improve on the limitations of current blockchain design. The highlight of IOTA is the Tangle, IOTA's answer to the blockchain, in which tokens can be transferred without any fees! This enables micropayments which is ideal for the Internet of Things economy, which is one of the primary industries IOTA targets. Want to know more? Watch this simple 2-minute video that explains everything in more detail.

The seed is your master private key. You can think of it as a combination of your username and password. Keep it secure and don't share it with anyone. Seeds in IOTA consist of 81 Trytes ('A-Z,9'), which is equivalent to 384-bit security. If someone has access to your seed, they can access your wallet. Save your seed securely since it cannot be recovered. Once you lose your seed, your funds cannot be recovered either. You can learn more about IOTA seed on this website.
The revolutionary nature of IOTA is perfect not only for IOT (Internet of Things) but also for microtransactions between people. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, it’s fast, gets better with more users and, just to be clear, we simply love it.
Although you can use our Tip IOTA browser extention as your wallet, it will only allow you to overview your funds so our recomendation is to download the latest IOTA wallet from GitHub if you wish to do anything more than that. The official IOTA wallet app is available for most of the popular operating systems and it allows you to overview, send and receive funds.

Once your wallet app is installed, you need to generate a new seed. In case you don't know what's a seed, we would advise you to read the "what is an IOTA seed" FAQ. To sum it up, the seed is your master private key. It’s a combination of your private key and password.

It’s also worth mentioning that you should never use any online seed generators for security reasons. Generate a new seed/wallet locally on your own computer. Below are a few commands you can use either on you Mac or a Linux computer. If you are using a Windows PC, currently your safest option is to use an app called KeepPass. Bellow is a video explaining how to use it.

Mac Terminal

cat /dev/urandom |LC_ALL=C tr -dc ‘A-Z9’ | fold -w 81 | head -n 1

Linux Terminal

cat /dev/urandom |tr -dc A-Z9|head -c${1:-81}

KeepPass app for Windows or Mac

We have set out a simple pricing model that will be fair to all users. We charge a 5% transaction fee that's capped at 30¢ maximum. This means that if you tip someone a cent, your fee is only 0.05¢ and if you tip someone a $100, your fee is only 30¢.

In comparison, SatoshiPay, charges a 10% flat fee for all of their transactions, no matter how big or small. Stripe, a payments processor for fiat currencies, charges 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction. It's worth mentioning that micro-transactions cannot be processed in any of the fiat currencies since the transaction charge is greater than the payment itself.

Based on our observations, tips are typically trivial and 90% of the time below a cent. 5% of a cent is 0.05 cents. Just to pay an average $20 dollar a month subscription, it would require 400 one cent transactions.

Hosting an IOTA node is not free

What’s an IOTA node, you might ask? In simple terms, a node is basically a server that processes transactions. We require hosting our own node to process all outgoing transactions. This so-called node can be run on an average laptop but as we grow, so does the need for faster and more reliable hardware. To run a server around the clock is not cheap. It can cost anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month, depending on the number of transactions we will require to handle. People often assume that IOTA is free and for the most part this statement is true. IOTA is free at an expense of your own or someone else's electricity bill. You see, IOTA requires POW (Proof of Work). Proof of Work prevents Denial of Service and spam attacks on the network. It's a computationally hard puzzle to solve, but easy to verify. This Proof of Work algorithm uses your CPU and GPU in order to verify transactions and typically only takes a few seconds to maximum a minute. If you only do 1 to 10 transactions a month, this is not going to affect you in the slightest, however, in our scenario, this is something that is going to be done without a stop.

The reality of starting a good product in 2018

Besides server costs, there is the domain, user analytics tools, marketing and re-marketing tools, email collection and email campaign tools. Design and development tools, subscriptions, storage, just to name a few. People will be saying, sure there are free tools for most of these needs but unfortunately, most of them are free on trial basis or are limited to a certain amount of users or visitors. Once these days or numbers run out, you’re out of luck and cannot develop a product any further.

Besides using IOTA tech, we have no relation to the IOTA Foundation. Since our product name also uses “IOTA” as a part of it, a lot of people assume that Tip IOTA is a product made by the IOTA Foundation. That is simply not true. We are planning to apply for the IOTA ecosystem fund in the near future, to accelerate Tip IOTA, but besides that, we have not received any funding neither from them nor anyone else.

We do not plant to build Tip IOTA and leave it in the dust once it's done. We will be constantly maintaining it and building out new functionality. All of this requires work. A lot of it. We are working on a roadmap that will clearly illustrate our process and where we would like to take Tip IOTA in the near as well as far future.

IOTA tokens are available from multiple exchanges and more are coming later this year. We use mainly Bitfinex and never had any issues with it although it’s worth mentioning that they have stopped IOTA trading in the USA so currently, Binance is probably a better option. Some might find purchasing cryptocurrency slightly daunting because of the processes and safety mechanisms that are put in place by exchanges and therefore we are constantly looking for new ways how to integrate an easy way of purchasing IOTA right into our Chrome extension. We believe that getting more tokens should be no more than a few clicks away.