ChangeTip now supports Facebook

Good news, ChangeTip fans: As of a few days ago, you can now spend your ChangeTip via Facebook, sending money to friends, family, or public figures like musicians. This will add to the stable of existing ChangeTip support, which currently includes Reddit and Twitter, expanding the user base by an estimated 1.23 billion active accounts.

Dan Held, the vice president of ChangeTip, said of the new support, “With over 1 billion users, enabling this on Facebook opens up a unique way to bring new people into bitcoin.”

ChangeTip is a service that seeks to ease the integration of new users into Bitcoin, by creating temporary wallets for users of a specific service, allowing Bitcoins to be sent to them without their having to intentionally create a wallet. This is great, because it provides a way to get over some of the network hurdle of Bitcoin while also growing the underlying infrastructure – many people who receive substantial tips wind up creating a Bitcoin wallet in order to withdraw them, and are then part of the Bitcoin ecosystem in a meaningful way.

Unfortunately, ChangeTip, as part of its nature, cannot operate trustlessly. That does not, however, mean that it has no value; and, the bigger the service gets, the bigger the incentive against them vanishing with the bag, both legal and game-theoretical.

The ChangeTip team reported that it took only a few weeks of work to build the Facebook integration, which bodes well for ChangeTip becoming a staple across many platforms.

“Facebook is the biggest social media network, so it was a top priority for us,” Held said.

It’ll be interesting to see whether or not the Facebook user base takes to ChangeTip. The service has seen substantial adoption on Reddit, but mass acceptance has come more slowly on Twitter. The service may, eventually, come to be the primary way that people give financial gifts to their loved ones, at least until Bitcoin adoption is so ubiquitous that it is possible to do without the service entirely.