It could be feature creep, but it's definitely not scope creep. Steem is a coin blockchain and steemit.com already functions to send STEEM. Tipping is sending STEEM where the only difference is it's called "tipping".

I like it simple too. But definitely think about the tipping, because there’s a lot more that function might achieve. Tipping could be a gateway into crowdfunding on here, either in a small-scale way or larger if that’s what the community wants. A (verified) charity could post an appeal for its donation campaign. An inventor could describe a product he wants to develop. And instead of getting a basketful of upvotes and walking away with a $20 post, suddenly that poster has the money needed to create a new product or charter a plane full of medical supplies into some hurricane-torn developing country. I’d be a little wary of the cash-outs, so might suggest there could be a maximum dollar amount, a seniority requirement (enough posts and good will over time), or maybe anyone participating in crowdfunding would need to have a certain vesting stake. Something to think about.

I am always one to fight feature bloat. And I very much appreciate keeping a clean UI. But tipping does seem like a useful feature to have. What kind of community do we want to foster here? One where people frequently go above and beyond to reward quality content? That sounds good to me!

Of course, this feature should be pretty trivial, so feature bloat isn't a huge concern. In this case, also, I think there's a pretty decent option available in terms of UI design, which is that the tip button can be hidden behind the upvote button. In general, I'm probably not going to tip a post I haven't already upvoted. Since I can't upvote twice, why not show a tip button when I've upvoted?

That was always the struggle I had with my side project. There's so much data and so many features we *could* make, but there's only ever so much screen real estate and time to work with and competing factors to account for.

But tipping might be very useful and wanted feature, even essential. We will have price stable cryptocurrency with free transactions! That could be a huge success for people who want to give and recieve tips.

First, thanks @pfunk for helping me get my miner up and running a couple weeks ago via Slack. It's working great.

Second, if Steemit is going to truly appeal to the masses we need simpler tools than what your describing to transfer funds to another user. When I think about the masses, I picture my 62 year old Aunt who uses Facebook and Twitter heavily but has no concept of crypto-currency or wallets or wallet addresses. So a simple tip button for someone like that makes a lot of sense. 

Along those same lines, the masses may have a hard time with cashing out through an exchange. Maybe a future option would be to link up with a service like Gyft where users can exchange Steem for gift cards with a click or two.

Yeah, but I think that's still too difficult.

If there were a tipping button, what it could look like? How it would function?

What comes to my mind is something like a small button (like up and down votes) that would open the transfer popup, prefilled with the account name that is going to be tipped. User should have to only type the amount and press Transfer button.

Even simpler would be that if there were a fixed tip sum and a simple button for that. "Press this button and you tip 0.50 SMD to the author." But I think I'd rather like to keep the choice for amount and currency.