How to get to Decentralization by Passing Through Centralization — Or, “A Reddcoin Tipbot Love Story” Tech Adept Follow Jan 21 · 6 min read

In the early days of the cryptocurrency space, it became amazingly obvious to those exploring the new technology that one of the best applications for the new “digital money” was the ability to rapidly zap any amount desired over to another user rapidly. Digital tipping was born and shared quickly. Using BTC, the process seemed to take a while, but amazingly, worked.

Then LTC and DOGE got in on the game on Reddit. Faster transactions and more complex bot software emerged. Tipbots proliferated, with centralized wallets making the idea of sharing the knowledge and value of the coins a ton of fun…and also creating tantalizing targets for hackers and unethical operators. Announcements of bot hack and thefts happened with depressing regularity, in equal parts as much a social issue as a technical one. So the industry’s decentralized ethic was re-imagined as a decentralized, hack-proof solution that our beloved Reddcoin saw as “ReddID” and similar tipping solutions.

The Reddcoin Dev team is still working to finalize a ready-for-public version of the decentralized #ReddID browser extension-based platform-agnostic tipping solution, but as a stepping stone to that progress, we’ve rebuilt and re-launched the original @tipreddcoin Twitter tipbot.

Existing ReddHeads who followed the tipbot once-upon-a-time should find their funds are still intact and connected to their Twitter accounts. These funds may be tipped or staked, and are available for withdrawal through the normal operation of the @tipreddcoin tipbot.

Re-activation required quite a bit of rewriting to bring the code up-to-date with Twitter’s API changes, but the work was executed for a number of reasons, all equally important.

Every ReddHead that’s staking, and every RDD being staked is important to our underway (52%+ complete) protocol upgrade, through the new v3.x Reddcoin Core wallets. if you’re not aware of that and are holding or staking Reddcoin, please read other postings on www.reddcoin.com, here on Medium under Tech Adept’s profile or our twitter.com/@reddcoin feed. Join us in Telegram at t.me/@ReddcoinOfficial for help or hand-holding in the upgrade process, or to answer any questions or concerns live. The RDD that users had deposited in the tipbot in days past were always the property of those same ReddHeads, and it has been a point of honor and integrity for the team to act only as caretakers and protectors of any funds or access entrusted to us. When the tipbot was taken out of service by Twitter’s endpoint and API changes, we discussed a number of times what the fair and appropriate way to address that was, and we’re proud to have been able to restore access to the tipbot with all existing users’ funds intact. The tipbot, though a centralized component, will be an integral piece of the overall ReddID solution due to a need to authenticated private messaging on the various social media platforms to avoid “tipping graffiti” over platform pages, and to notify new and onboarding users. We expect that this functionality will evolve to a fully decentralized model when possible, but due to the amount of work involved to reach that goal, we decided that a less-perfect intermediate solution is always better than waiting forever for the perfect solution.

We look forward to encouraging and driving some of the same tipping enthusiasm that originally gave Reddcoin a reason for being invented to begin with.

Leveraging that same sense of sharing love, rewarding others for worthwhile content and ideas, and allowing all social network users to reap the rewards due them for their small or large contributions to the social mediasphere without fear of seizure, censorship, or excessive fees.

Take back control of your payments, tip, stake and share Reddcoin with those you care about today!

With that, please find complete instructions for operating the Reddcoin (RDD) Twitter tipbot below (with acknowledgement to the original Reddcoin team for original docs) . Feel free to report any issues to Reddcoin devs and community in our Telegram or Discord chatrooms.

Reddcoin Tipbot on Twitter (@tipreddcoin)

The bot is registered under the handle @tipreddcoin. The bot automatically approves any follow request. Below I lay out in details all the steps to register and interact with the bot. Please contact me with any bug report or improvement suggestion.

@tipreddcoin accepts all commands in both direct messages and public tweets. You should get back responses in corresponding format. The difference between the two is: in public tweets, you need to put @tipreddcoin at the beginning of the tweet so it’s considered a @reply to the bot. In direct messages, there is no need for that.

1. Self Registration

Follow @tipreddcoin. This will trigger three things. 1) @tipreddcoin will immediately send you a follow request. Please accept it ASAP. 2) @tipreddcoin will also immediately create a Reddcoin account for you, including your Reddcoin address. 3) @tipreddcoin will then reply to you in a public tweet to inform you of the success of registrion and ask you to get more information with “+info” command. The reason a public tweet is used is due to the fact that sending direct message is forbidden until after you accept bot’s follow request. Once you accept the follow request from @tipreddcoin, You can now send +info command. Using direct message, send “+info” to @tipreddcoin. In your message body, you can put in any random text as long as “+info” appears in the text and with space around it. Using public tweets, you can send “@tipreddcoin +info” and you will get back account information in a public tweet from bot.

2. Simple Commands

@tipreddcoin accepts several simple commands. By “simple”, it means ‘single-word’. “+register”: explicit registration. “+accept”: if you are unregistered, use this command to accept all pending tips sent by other already registered users. “+history”: details of the last transaction. “+rates”: latest market prices of RDD/BTC from several exchanges. “+summary”: total number of tips and amount of RDD you have sent and received.

3. Give Tips to Twitter Users

The simplest tipping command follows this format: +tip @recipient_screen_name amount RDD where amount is a number. Unlike Reddit, on Twitter you must always specify recipient screen name. @tipreddcoin recognises a large number of variations. Let’s go through them: +tip can be replaced by +give, +send, +pay You can reverse the order of ammount and currency but you must remove any space in between, e.g. +pay @recipient_screen_name RDD100 You can replace @recipient_screen_name with a Reddcoin wallet address You can replace amount with one of the keywords which will do two things a) choose an amount for you b) also generate very fun message! All the keywords are listed in this Regular Expression: (all|flip|megaflip|gigaflip|roll|megaroll|gigaroll|sushi|pi|e|leet|quarter|half|cookie|gum|beer|nicebeer|hug|kiss|highfive|fart|coffee)

4. Withdraw

The syntax of “+withdraw” is very similar to “+tip”: +withdraw address amount RDD

5. Give Tips to Unregistered Twitter Users

When you tip someone who is not yet registered with @tipreddcoin, there is one extra step you need to do. When you send command: +tip @total_stranger 100 RDD, the following will happen:

Your tip is taken from your wallet and put inside the private wallet of the bot. The tip is marked as pending. You have to make sure @total_stranger accept the pending tip by either following @tipreddcoin or sending it “+accept” command.

P.S. The Reddit Reddcoin tipbot is coming back next while we continue to work towards a full ReddID solution. #Stake_on!!