Have you ever been eager to buy a fashionable item or a hardware piece but you have no idea where to get it or what is the best deal. That is what Bitfortip is up for, it allows you to post some descriptions and (optionally) a picture of what you want for other users to help you locating it at your preferred price. Of course you will need to offer a bounty, which will be paid to whomever gives the most helpful answer; considering the time, effort and money that you will save, giving a small tip (as the name of the site) to your helper sounds like a fair deal. The minimum amount required to post an inquiry is as low as 0.0001 BTC (roughly 7 cents at the time of writing this review).

The service is also available as an android application for smart phone users. Its design is wise and neat. You could download from Google Apps Store. If users are out of Bitcoins, there is a buy button on the app that offers them the choice to acquire some BTC through Paxful – A peer to peer marketplace.

The sign up process cannot be any easier: On the right of the home page, click on sign up and fill in the form. You only have to provide very basic information, nothing personal, your e-mail, a username, a password (twice) and solve a captcha to verify that you are a human (as usual).

You will receive a confirmation link to the e-mail you registered, and once get verified, you can proceed to log in. Then you have two choices: Answer questions or post your inquiries.

Answering questions

On the top of the site you can find a list of languages and flags, each one takes you to the active questions in that given language. By default, the site will load the English questions. The process of replying to questions is similar to that of sites like Yahoo Answers: You browse them, open the question and submit your answer. If you want to increase your chances of being picked as the best answer, try to make your answer be descriptive and specific; only the posters whose answers are chosen to be best will receive the tips, the other answers won’t be rewarded anything. The questions been tipped are shown as green at the top of the question list, to the left.

Posting inquiries

Do you remember where the sign up form is? You can find the form to post a new question in the same place, when you are logged in. There are only three mandatory fields: The language, the title and the reward, perhaps, to get the most out of the site you better fill the remaining three fields.

Perhaps, you will need first to deposit some BTC, remember that you have to offer a bounty for the help you will get. You can find your personal deposit address under your balance and user name, a handy “copy” shortcut can be found to the left of it.

To post a question first you have to choose the language that you will be posting in, at the moment you have 10 options. There is no control over this, but certainly you will want to pick the correct language, to get better answers. The “question” (title) explains itself, try to be as descriptive as possible, but keep it short. Then, add a description of what you want (the item, the range of prices you are expecting, the country it needs to be delivered to, etc.), add a few tags to help other users to find your question through the search box and attach a picture (preferably of the item you are looking for). Finally, specify the amount of BTC to be awarded (remember, the site won’t allow less than 0.1 mBTC here) and click on submit.

There is no time limit to select a best answer, so you are free to take your time to decide. Anyway, remember that if you take too long to choose one you will discourage other users from helping you in the future (especially if valid / complete answers have been given). You do not have to pick an answer if you are not satisfied with them, you can add comments to every answer, like requesting more detail or providing feedback.

Opinion on the site

Bitfortip has great potential, its owner (Panagiotis Pollis, Panagot on Bitcointalk.org) is always trying to improve the site and actively promoting it. The user base is relatively small as of now, especially in languages other than English. That does not mean that you are not going to get a good answer, from my personal experience (two questions asked) the results have been satisfactory. The site has already been around for more than a year and has plans of expansion.

Possible drawbacks include that if you do not receive an appropriate answer, you will have to deal with customer support to get a refund. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that you will be awarded for giving an excellent answer, as it happens on other sites (like Yahoo answers) many users forget about their questions and never return.

A nice feature is that open and closed questions are separated. There is also a link to check your own questions, which comes in handy if you want a quick check of your activity on the site. Bitfortip just included three categories (Fashion, Tech/Web and Instruction).