In a move reminiscent of Reddit Note's much acclaimed launch yet quick demise, Coinbase today announced that they will shut down their tipping button as of the apt date April 1st 2015. The Coinbase announcement reads:

Today we're announcing that we've decided to shut down our bitcoin Tip Button. The project has seen some good usage since we launched it, with about 10,000 users accepting bitcoin tips across a variety of websites.

However, another excellent tipping service in the bitcoin community, ChangeTip, has gotten some even better traction, and done a great job at pushing the tipping ecosystem forward. So today we’d like to show our support for them and encourage existing users of our tip button to migrate over to ChangeTip.

At Coinbase, we view our core business as providing bitcoin infrastructure (secure APIs for bitcoin storage, exchange, wallets, and merchant tools). ChangeTip is an excellent example of a company which uses our APIs, and we’d like to support them instead of competing with them. Our goal is to have a thriving ecosystem of many companies in the bitcoin space building innovative applications like this.

We will be helping customers migrate to ChangeTip over the coming weeks and our Tip Button will be officially shut down on April 1st.

Coinbase's claim that the tipping button has seen "good usage" is demonstrably false. When the service was launched back in November of last year, Coinbase set the default tipping amount at 300 bits or 0.0003 BTC if you will. Assuming the majority of users sent a default sized tip, this would amount to a ball park figure totalling 3 BTC in redemptions to date.

Coinbase will now help migrate the non-existent users of their tipping service over to ChangeTip, who today announced the ability to redirect even more unwanted tips to Connie Gallippi's and Patrick Murck's BitGive Foundation.