There is no imaginable scenario where the 1% withdrawl fee is any remotely viable amount of money.
Apparently it wasn't.
I won't suggest one way or another on the privacy issues but it wouldn't be the first time a tech company has gone live with a weak or shoddy business model. In fact, their model might have been "get hyped then sell out" in which case privacy would likely have been a real issue down the line. In the end they just semi-sold-out to AirBnB apparently (which seems weird in itself).
Hmm. Is it possibly BashCo is a small blocker in the hopes that high fees would push people to solutions like changetip. Didn't seem to work out though. In fact, possibly counterproductive since high fees will discourage withdrawal which is where they put their fees. So typical core-type logic there.
By the way, I haven't heard but are funds getting refunded automatically?
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if 1/2 a million dollars a month are tipped and later withdrawn... thats 5K a month
But 1/2 million dollars a month tipped and left for later use is $0.00. Which is the way I used it. Tips are too small to bother withdrawing and I just kept them around to tip others. (Edit: this does suggest another funding method which is investment of deposited funds. Shades of fractional reserve there though. Which is to be expected really)
The best way to fund would probably be to keep a small percentage of inbound tips. Thus if I tip you $10 , I still feel like I tipped you $10, you get $9.98 and are still happy and the tip service gets its cut. It would probably help if people could advertise that they consider their writing supported by the tips (like ChartBuddy has a tip icon). The only other way really is analysis of what's being tipped and targeted advertising (which hasn't yet totally proven itself as far as I'm aware and would probably upset a lot of the Bitcoin crowd).
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One thing that I think will also change the equation by a lot is that there is so much red tape involved. Money service business, KYC/AML and all that.
That's definitely put me off of developing several ideas that I thought would have been pretty cool.
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IDK for real, but my feeling is that LN is not going to be attractive to individual users.
I have yet to see a mock-up of a user-interface for using LN and I strongly suspect you are correct.
I am particularly interested in how competing implementations will supposedly be handled.