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I would like some help finding prior art for US20150262138.

The patent is about a Bitcoin "tip button" and the abstract describes it as:

"A system and method for transaction bitcoin is described. Bitcoin can be sent to an email address. No miner's fee is paid by a host computer system. Hot wallet functionality is provided that transfers values of some Bitcoin addresses to a vault for purposes of security. A private key of a Bitcoin address of the vault is split and distributed to keep the vault secure. Instant exchange allows for merchants and customers to lock in a local currency price. A vault has multiple email addresses to authorize a transfer of bitcoin out of the vault. User can opt to have private keys stored in locations that are under their control. A tip button rewards content creators for their efforts. A bitcoin exchange allows for users to set prices that they are willing to sell or buy bitcoin and execute such trades."

I know ChangeTip launched Tip.Me around November 4, 2014 while CoinBase launched their tip button at around November 18, 2014. Are there any earlier prior-art aside from ChangeTip?

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Principal engineer at ChangeTip here (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimlyndon). I actually built the first ever bitcoin tip button for content creators.

The tip payment page (Tip.me) was actually launched on July 29th, 2014. The tip.me (bitcoin tip) button was launched on August 28th, 2014. I've attached what they looked like at that time and you can do an image search or other internet archive research to see that they were indeed active then. (we also have our code repository to back us up on that):

button1 button2 button3

There was a small update (counter for number of tippers) and marketing push that happened in November, as you remember. We released our current version 2 in Jan 2015 (which I also built) that included a new look and feel and better integration with our Wordpress plugin:

tipbuttontoday

Since CoinBase, at least in your abstract above, doesn't actually mention "bitcoin" in their tip button description, you could also look at Flattr's tip buttons, gittip, and I'm sure you could find others.

Cheers!

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Before ChangeTip, there was @PikaPay, also a bitcoin tip solution. Was a user since Oct '13. This clearly predates.

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