Community Spotlight: Nano Tip Bot by Andrew Mitchell

An easy way to reward and introduce people to Nano

Hey everyone!

For this week’s spotlight, I sat down with Andrew Mitchell, developer of the Nano Tip Bot for Twitter. It’s a great tool for rewarding people for great content or introducing new users to Nano and I was excited to chat with him about how he became involved in Nano and what led to him creating this project.

Welcome to the Weekly Spotlight, it’s great to have you here. Can you introduce yourself to those who may not have met you yet?

Hey! My name’s Andrew Mitchell and I developed the Nano Tip Bot on Twitter. I invested in Nano in early December 2017 after I saw some random post on /r/CryptoCurrency talking about a free and instant Bitcoin. After sending Bitcoin to and from exchanges and feeling frustrated by delays in confirmation, I bought some Nano. Sometime after that, I got interested in how the backend works, so I spun up a virtual server and started playing around with the node software.

I’m pretty active on the Discord (@mitche50 (www.nanotipbot.com)#0209) if you ever wanted to chat or had any questions or concerns!

That seems to be the way a lot of people are introduced to Nano, getting tired of waiting for Bitcoin to send. Can you tell us about your @NanoTipBot project?

The @NanoTipBot on Twitter is an automated bot that facilitates sending tips on Twitter to friends, colleagues, content providers, etc. The bot automatically generates an account that is tied to your username and Twitter ID when you send a !register command through DM or another person sends you a tip through the !tip command. These accounts are live on the Nano network and can be viewed through your preferred explorer.

Users can interact with the bot through DMs to register for an account, check the account linked with their Twitter ID, check their balance, withdraw from the bot, donate to the project or get a list of commands.

To send tips, you simply tag @NanoTipBot in a reply or tweet (not a DM) and include the !tip command formatted like !tip 1. Any users mentioned after the !tip command will receive a tip. For example:

@NanoTipBot !tip 1 @mitche50

@NanoTipBot Thanks for the help! !tip 1 @mitche50

@NanoTipBot !tip 1 Thanks for the help, @mitche50

These would all send a 1 Nano tip to @mitche50

The bot will reply confirming the tip was sent and posting a link to the sender’s account on nanode.co for you to look at if you would like more information.

The Nano Team is a huge fan of your project, we’ve used it on multiple occasions to tip users on Twitter. What motivated you to create such a useful tool?

The discord has an active tipbot that people use frequently and seem to like, but I felt that it was very encapsulated. There was no publicity generated, you needed to be in the Nano discord already and really only current Nano users were passing around value to each other.

I wanted to give a tool to people who could introduce new users to Nano. On Twitter, there are 336 million active users. Anyone of them can now receive a tip without leaving the website, which I think is pretty powerful. Every tip mentions the $NANO cash tag, so anyone searching for it could stumble upon the bot and get some publicity through that as well. And now, anyone can reward or introduce someone to Nano without the hassle of setting up a wallet.

It sounds like your main focus is on the tip bot, are you working on anything else in the Nano ecosystem?

The majority of my time is spent with my biggest project, my new daughter who was just born on August 30th! Aside from her and the tip bot, I hang out in the Nano Center discord a lot. Recently, I have worked on implementing the Distributed Proof of Work system, provided feedback on content (videos, editing posts, voice-overs, etc), and worked on some smaller projects such as the Nano Lottery (which is still looking for someone to host it, DM me if you are able to!)

So what’s next? Now you have armed Twitter with a near instant and fee-less way to share Nano, are there any plans to expand to other social media platforms?

I’m looking into integrating the tip bot into other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Vimeo, etc. I’ve spent a lot of time recently modifying the code base to allow me to integrate new systems fairly easily. We’re close to having it done on Facebook.

The other thing I’m working on is having a paper tip option. The idea would be that you can generate $1, $5, $10 paper tips paid in Nano. The receiver would go to a link where they could enter their personal address and the tip bot would send them the USD equivalent of Nano at the time the tip was generated. Any tips that aren’t claimed within 30 days will be returned to the address the tipper provides. This is just in early development, so keep your eyes peeled for when it gets implemented!

Thanks for stopping by Mitch, your work valued by the entire Nano community. As a sign of The Nano Foundations appreciation of your dedication we would like to send you a custom engraved Nano Ledger S — Keep up the good work!