Today, we are excited to release a new bitcoin tip button for accepting micropayments anywhere on the web. The tip button can be easily added to any web page and enables website visitors to tip using a Coinbase account or other bitcoin wallet.
One-click tips
For users already signed into Coinbase, one-click tips make online micropayments easier than ever. Just click - and the content creator has received money. The default amount sent per tip is 300 bits (about $0.10 USD at the time of this post), but senders can customize this amount to whatever they'd like.
Why tips?
One of the most exciting aspects of Bitcoin is that it enables new behaviors that aren't possible with traditional payment networks. A great example of this is micropayments (payments less than $1.00). Traditional payment methods are generally too expensive to support micropayments. Bitcoin is the first open, interoperable payment network that enables small amounts of money to be sent frictionlessly anywhere in the world. Microtips are the perfect application of this technology.
Coinbase merchants like Humble Bundle, Wikipedia, United Way and services built using the Coinbase API like ChangeTip have proven that consumers have a strong desire to make small payments online. To date, over 30% of orders on Coinbase are $1 or below. In an effort to make sending small amounts of bitcoin easier than ever, we decided to build the tip button.