There isn’t one. Our site will provide comprehensive guidance and other information to assist sites wishing to accept tibs, but we will not register or track tibbees. All a tibbee needs to do is publish a link to tibdit which incorporates their bitcoin address.

When a user tibs, tibdit transmits a proof-of-tib token to the tibbee via the user’s browser, and subsequently pays out the value of the tib to the tibbee’s bitcoin address. tibbees can configure their website to grant access to content or take any other actions they wish in response to the receipt of a valid proof-of-tib token.

We engage in an agreement with our users, who are the customers, which entitles tibdit to withhold disbursal of tibs to specific tibbees, for example if we receive a number of reports of a tibbee not adhering to our published rules.

We have no legal relationship with the tibbees, although it is clearly in all parties interest for us to provide a level of support to them.

Please see our tibbee T&C’s page here

We keep unspent tibber funds in the tibber’s selected currency until it is required for tibbing. If a tibber has set their tibs to be worth 25c, then they will be worth 25c at the moment they confirm the tib.

Providing the tibbee receives at least five tibs per 72 hours, the maximum time between confirmation and disbursal is three days; during this time the value of the tib is in bitcoin and will be affected by exchange rate movements.

However, for busy sites, tibs will be disbursed within 36 hours of confirmation.

The value of all accumulated tibs is sent to the tibbee once thresholds described below are triggered.

It is possible that payouts to tibbees who receive tibs only occasionally will be exposed to several days of volatility, as we never disburse fewer than five tibs to a tibbee at once. This would however only affect a very small total tib value.

There are subscription management systems; we regard these as complementary. Consumers who are making repeat casual payments are an ideal source of leads for subscription purchases.

tibdit reintroduces the concept of repeat casual purchasing appropriate to digital reproduction and the level of granularity that prevails online, and enables publishers to offer subscriptions removed from the in-the-moment desire to pay for access to a specific content item (or online service).

Using VISA or MasterCard via our card-payment processor for purchases in traditional currencies. Similarly, we will use a cryptopayment processor for purchases made using bitcoin.

tibbers will primarily come to tibdit after clicking a tib button on a tibbee’s site. Registration will be either by email+password or by oAuth account linking. After registration, users are asked to select their currency, set the value for each of the tibs in their first bundle, and choose how many tibs in the bundle. They then pay via the integrated payment processor, and then confirm the tib to the referring site.

If the user is registered and has not removed their tibdit browser cookie, and assuming that they still have a bundle with unspent tibs, then after clicking on the link or button on the tibbee’s site, they are presented with a pop-up tibdit window asking them to confirm the tib spend. When they confirm, the proof-of-tib token is sent via their browser, and they are returned to the tibber’s website.

No. Our customers, who are those making the micropayments and microdonations, need not even be aware that we use Bitcoin. We will naturally support Bitcoin as a user currency, but our key currencies at launch will be the US dollar, British pound, and Euro. We will roll out additional major national currencies as we expand into other markets.

All tibs are suspended for twenty-four hours before being sent so that tibs can be held if a tibber reports that a tibbee is not in compliance with our rules.

After this initial period, tibs are accumulated against tibbee bitcoin addresses. No disbursal to an address will occur until at least five tibs are accumulated against that address. This prevents tibbees from knowing an individual user’s tib values.

There will be only one disbursal to a single bitcoin address within any 12 hour period, this reduces the traffic on the bitcoin network, and keeps things manageable.

Once these minimum thresholds are met, tibs will continue to be accumulated until either fifty tibs are accumulated, or it is forty-eight hours since the previous dispersal to the tibbee’s bitcoin address, at which time all accumulated tibs for that address will be disbursed.

The concept was initially conceived in June of 2013, The company was registered on 9th September 2013.

There are the two founders (Justin and Pauline), two business advisers (Jan and Adam), our business development manager (Iain), senior developer (Claudio), part-time junior developer (Jim), full-time developer (Michael) and apprentice developer (Elena). Team members have differing time commitments to the project.

Short biographies are available at http://www.tibdit.com/aboutus

tibdit collects a 1.5 pence commission on each tib paid

Justin and Pauline met years ago when Justin was consulting to Defra, a UK Government agency.
A deep common respect was established, despite (or because of) their very different skills and a shared determination to deliver quality in the face of constant bureaucracy and office politics. Concluding that he couldn’t let go of the tibdit concept, Justin first reached out to Pauline, asking her to join him as an equal partner in the venture.

Subsequently a remarkably diverse group, both in personalities and in skill-sets, has come together with an understanding and an excitement about what will be achieved. That diversity has been absolutely key to our confidence within ourselves. Virtually every challenge expressed to us from external parties had already been explored and resolved.

We have the answer to an intransigent and critical problem in the online world, that is causing ongoing pain across a number of traditional industries, but particularly journalism.

tibdit’s approach is protected from predatory competition by a US method-of-business patent (application). This will provide ‘clear air’ while we build sufficient traction for the viral network-effect to take over. The patent claims will remain under seal until August 2015, but the protection applies from the filing date.

It is unlikely that sites or users will wish to maintain multiple accounts on multiple services to cover different users/sites using different micropayment platforms for casual spending. As with some other well-known internet brands, we expect to occupy a partial monopoly position through ‘first-viable-mover’ advantage.

Any publisher (including creator-publishers) of web content or automated online services which are digitally reproduced, and an average fee of around GBP 15p (US$ 25cents) is appropriate, or where the publisher would like to receive gratuities from site visitors.

Recipients of payments through our platform will range from volunteer free-site operators to major online news producers; from dating websites to sites which automate mathematical algorithms.

While unknown, the market is estimated by multiple analysts to exceed £10bn/y1, resulting in a viable solution being described as “the Holy Grail of the internet entrepreneur”2.

1 Value Partners digital media & management consultancy (2011)
2 Andrew Hilton, Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (2011)

tibdit are working with @banktothefuture to achieve circa £140k seed funding through their platform. We participated in their 4 week incubator to produce our investor pitch and video, which completed in August 2014. BanktotheFuture  are due to re-launch their platform in coming weeks and we expect our funding round to be listed shortly thereafter.

We are also exploring other seed funding options, including Ciphertrade.com and Angel Investors.

tibdit has filed a US Method-of-Business patent number 61/938,980 expansively covering the novel inventive aspects of our solution. The patent includes almost 40 separate claims and we are confident that it will ultimately be granted. The patent will remain under seal until August 2015, and inspection will follow some time after that. The patent gives us claim against the revenue of any infringing competitor offering service in the US from the date it was filed if the competitor cannot show prior art.

In addition, we have the trademark on the terms ‘tibdit’ and ‘tib’* when used in the context of financial services, covered internationally under the Madrid Protocols. (* with the exception of ‘tib’ when used in the context of consultancy services around betting. We are grateful to TIB Consulting GmbH in Austria for their co-operation in this matter)

GBP £50k from the founders and advisers; £40k in cash and £10k in consultancy services.

We are interested in hearing from prospective seed level angel investors. We are also commencing exploratory dialogues with some VCs.
We are looking at bitcoin based crowd-funding, such as bitcoin based stock exchanges, as well as more UK FCA regulated equity crowd -funding platforms.

Yes; we received advanced SEIS approval from HMRC for investoment of £140k in September 2014.

We are seeking to raise £140k to support tibdit through several months of live operating to prove the model and develop sufficient traction for a viral network effect to begin to take hold

Our current forecast is that tibdit will require a further £500k approximately nine months later to reach self-funding. Since every transaction is revenue generating, the revenue curve will be as steep or steeper than the customer acquisition curve.

The list includes beenz, flooz, cred, ecash/digicash, cybercoin/cybercash, google one-pass, mucash, dynamo, tipjoy, tipit.to, twippr, and a bunch of others. Also The W3C MPTP (Micro Payment Transfer Protocol) initiative, started in 1995, deserves special mention.

The commonality of the same basic errors being repeated again and again over many years is depressing, and yet it gives us the confidence that our approach truly is inventive. These errors can be summarised simply as finding different ways to resolve the technical and financial-transaction-cost hurdles, while paying scant attention to the cognitive issues inherent in small value payments.

This could be because you’ve saved a historical version in your cache. Try pressing Ctrl-shift-r, or command-shift-r (for mac). If this doesn’t resolve the problem, please provide feedback though our feedback link.

No.
While it can be challenging at first to get to grips with the business model in the absence of live examples, technically the platform is remarkably simple. There is a single financial product, with purchase and spend transactions, and some basic account management and transaction history functionality.

Since individual tibdit transactions are valued between £0.03p and £0.75p, any attempt at money laundering (or other fraud) will be obvious from the tibbing profile. The nature of the service is that, when viewed from above, there will be a ‘noise floor’ with tibs of varying values going from tibbers to tibbees in a chaotic manner. Attempts to pipe any significant amount through tibdit will show up immediately - initially by human monitors, but moving into statistical signal-processing automated scanning in time.

There is no need for KYC checks to use tibdit, as deposit transactions have a maximum spend of £75 (100 x £0.75 tibs, or a 500 x £0.03 tibs = £15). There will also be a limit per 12 months of £2000. If there is a significant demand from users wishing to exceed these limits, we will implement a KYC compliance process and unlock the restrictions.

The nature of the service is that, when viewed from above, there will be a ‘noise floor’ with tibs of varying values going from tibbers to tibbees in a chaotic manner.

tibs are not permitted for (1) gambling or other chance-based incentivised tibbing, (2) financial services of any kind (3) supply of physical goods. This will eliminate most of the ways a user might be defrauded out of their tibs.

A tib is a single micropayment or microdonation. There is no easy alternative word in English that covers both of these meanings. We also use tibbing to mean the spending of a tib, and tibber and tibbee for the tibdit user and the recipient of the tib respectively.