Bitcoin Forum

http://imgur.com/GSwxxQz

I invested a lot of time setting up my company's website to work with Coinbase's API. Three months have passed; not a single order has been paid for with BTC. And now Coinbase is demanding way too much information - this is the last straw.

I need a Bitcoind client that can be installed on a Godaddy server. Until then, my company can't take BTC.

They want your company name and address, and your merchant tax ID. Unless you're running a scam, that should not be a problem. That information should be on your web site. In some US states, and in the EU, it's a criminal offense to accept online payments without disclosing the actual name and address from which the business is conducted.

Nobody hosts anything serious on GoDaddy.

That's his problem, not Coinbase asking questions.

We are suffering merchant adoptacalypse but their shop missed out.

Unlucky. Shit happens even while shit happens.

Joe

I have been waiting for 6 months to get just 2 orders. What can I say other than... Hang in there...

These informations are obviously necessary. Bitcoin hasn't been invented to scam people and also not to evade taxes.

Well, I think we are still a ways of from people making lots of orders.

It seems pretty simple to me. I want to spend dollars because I am paid in dollars. My bank account is in dollars so I go to stores that accept dollars. Pretty simple.

Now if people will want to spend bitcoins on regular things, they need to be paid in bitcoins. Very very few people are paid in bitcoins and the few that could be often cash out because of volitility.

If Bitcoin becomes really good as a way to transfer money then some people will have bitcoins on hand and be willing to spend them. So the best way for us to make bitcoins real is by spending and sending them.

To me the most logical cases follow 2 scenarios.

1. Bitcoin becomes really good at international payments. A person will receive bitcoins from overseas and because Bitcions are sitting in a person's wallet and instead of cashing them out for cash, a person just spends them online and saves a bit in fees and and exchange rates.

2. The undocumented, illegal, and unbanked start getting paid in Bitcoin and then spending it.

Illegal - Part of bitcoins original growth came from illegal sells on the Silk Road. Some of this similar activity might further Bitcoin.  Maybe Open Bizzar? But there are other options.

Undicumented - The illegal and undocumented aliens in countries all over the world might adopt Bitcoin to send money home to family instead of stockpiling large piles of cash to smuggle. And/or they start shopping online like the rest of us but start paying in Bitcoin instead because they don't need a name, address and #ID.  To do this they need easy access points in and out of bitcoin like the prepaid Visa bought at conveinance store -> Circle option or Bitcoin ATMs that protect there anonymity and privacy.

Unbanked - There is also a huge option for the legal and working but unbanked in the third world. Most people in the world still don't have bank accounts. Bitcoin still had a chance to become their means of digital value store and transfer.

I'm not sure if all of these or just some of them will be the tipping point but when they happen stores will be doing sales in Bitcoin and offer employees options to get paid in bitcoins which will then drive more sales in other businesses.  This makes Bitcoin more legitimate.

But it's not very useful going from just fiat -> Bitcoin -> to purchase of something I could have bought with fiat  in the first place.  Just doesn't make sense. Why? Because I lose money in fees.

Bitcoin being accepted in stores and widely used us it's killer app, but it can't happen first because it just doesn't make sense.  Some of these other things I mentioned do serve and individuals interest and can help feel bitcoins wide growth, adaption and use.

Need incentive for consumer to pay using bitcoin.

If your company only serve local consumer, it is cheaper and more convenient for them just to do a bank to bank transfer or use credit card.

ignoring the other posts of cry babies complaining of volatility and lack of spending. ill concentrate on the OP's question

the solution is to NEVER have a bitcoinD on the web server. multiple security issues for this.

all you need is a database of public keys.

simply generate keys from an offline computer and put just the public keys into a database onine for the website to then display to customers. and you simply keep updating the database as the addresses get used.

you then use the offline computer to manage the bitcoins far far far away from the website. this is called "cold store".

then all you need is a API for price evaluation.

... simples

lastly
ADVERTISE, ADVERTISE, ADVERTISE.
no one will spend bitcoins if you dont advertise your business accepts them. EG everyone knows overstock and dell accepts bitcoin, thus they are doing $millions in bitcoin transactions

I'm not sure what did you expect. If success would equal to accepting bitcoin, then everyone would do it already.

It depends on your product and marketing too. Bitcoin is still small, expecting any sales for an average shop is only wishful thinking, there's a high chance that your business do not appeal to the demographic of bitcoiners.

I'm not sure how others do, but I avoid spending if the exchange rate is depressed anyways.

I sympathize with the OP. It's not the first story I've heard of small/internet businesses accepting bitcoin but getting few, if any, orders.

Accepting bitcoins shouldn't depend on third parties (e.g., coinbase). However, running your own bitcoind isn't as easy as it's made out to be. I rented a VPS for a few months to try it out. It cost me around $10 a month (and in the end it didn't have enough RAM to work effectively).

I doubt many business are making even $10 extra profit a month by accepting bitcoin.

A lightweight application a business could run just to listen for transactions on the Bitcoin network would help IMO.

I want to thank the OP for being a pioneer and trying to accept bitcoin, and thanks for the report that it wasn't worth it. This is useful information.

DONT RUN A BITCOIND OR ANY WALLET ON A WEB SERVER!!! seriously!!
no wonder so many people are screaming bitcoin hacks.. you lot make it simple for them
NEVER EVER EVER have private keys on a website

and if you cant even make $2.50 a week profit.. (before even thinking of bitcoin) then you have bigger issues than bitcoin

I rented a VPS so bitcoind would be running somewhere with nothing else running (e.g., no apache so no website).

If bitcoind could include "watch-only" addresses, then there wouldn't be the danger of private keys being hackable. But you're right. Since the private keys must be in the wallet in order to watch for transactions, the best advice is not to use it for this purpose. In my case, I imported the private keys into the wallet.dat offline and then encrypted it with a high entropy (128 bit) password. Then I uploaded the encrypted wallet.dat to the VPS. I only wanted it for watching. While I think it was relatively secure (and I never had enough mbits to make it a decent target), your advice is best: don't do it. It was more of a test in my case.


I agree. That's why I gave up what I was doing and decided never to try anything again the rest of my life. Wish me luck!

I think the big problem regarding sales is my company's small market is simply not using BTC yet.

I recently learned of these tools that I'll research and hopefully implement instead of Coinbase (which I'll be dropping completely) and seem to be a bit better developed than a homebrew solution:

https://github.com/coinkite/coinkite-real-time-invoice
https://github.com/gary-rowe/MultiBitMerchant

Are there any glaring security issues with these technologies?

Coinbase is an exchange and has to comply with the same rules as any other exchange that deals with Dollars. This is not their fault. Take your bitch to the SEC and FinCEN.

Secondly, its not Bitcoin's fault your marketing sucks either.

Thirdly, GoDaddy is hosting for school children, not serious business people. Get a proper VPS or hosted server to host a Core.

a few yes.

coinkite is a web wallet (not on your server) much like blockchain.info but with a price estimator and QR code customer splash screen

multibit is a light wallet that uses less ram etc. but still leaves you in the ugly position of having a wallet on your own server.

is it an online store? or a face to face (brick and mortar) business?

Switch to a serious domain/server host. GoDaddy is the most utter shit of the internet.

Yes, GoDaddy sucks. Fine. But switching to a different server or host doesn't address an issue in this thread. Odd that it keeps being brought up. Suppose the OP gets a different server/host. Q: What does he do with it so that he starts making sales in BTC? A: Nothing. He spends money on a better server/host and gets nothing in return.

And advertise? Sure. But advertising is very expensive. The OP would need to decide if spending a few thousand dollars on advertising will result in more than a few thousand dollars worth of BTC in sales. It seems unlikely to have this effect if his current BTC sales are zero.

BTC is a niche. Very few people have it and very few of those use it. If you don't believe me, start a BTC accepting business. Tell me how the crickets sound where you live.

Sounds like your company sucks and as a businessman you are a failure.

If you are only receiving money on your website, there is no need to run bitcoind or any other wallet software on it. Have the wallet on your own computer, and store a list of bitcoin addresses on your server.

When someone places an order, link their invoice to the bitcoin address. Use something like blockchain.info's API (https://blockchain.info/api) to check if the payment was received.

why don't you try bitpay?
actually I don't know why godaddy doesn't work with coinbase

Get a programmer to make a program that accepts Bitcoin, maintains a float on a more private exchange, checks the transaction and then sells on the exchange of your choice.

http://straight.romansnitko.com/

https://github.com/snitko/straight-server

Has anyone tried this open source free payment gateway?

What, an address and contact number is too much?

What if a customer asked for this info?

100% agree. It's easy to tell who here actually owns businesses on these forums, eh?

ROI is how I have to manage things. Right now I have to consider whether spending another 12+ hours getting one of these open source BTC solutions setup is worth the potential 2 sales in the next 6 months, or whether my time is better spent on less speculative projects.

This is the second time Coinbase has changed their information requirements for merchants, and your code just breaks on your website if you don't have their form fully filled out (I was caught by surprise the last time they did this). I don't think they're entitled to any of this information, especially considering 0 sales have occurred and I've never sold BTC for fiat through their system.

My company's industry is niche as it is, so maybe BTC will mature as a payment option in a year or two.

Coinbase complies with AML/KYC and is registered with FINCEN. They need to ask those things. The info requested is very basic and any legit business should have no problem divulging. Really, what's the problem here? Coinbase processes your payment, I'm pretty sure they need to keep this info on file. You go to your bank to open a business account, are you going to complain how they request this info as well?

As for the second part of your concern; Bitcoin is still going through growing pains. I hope you didn't expect people to line up to pay you in btc. You've spent your time just setting up the payment on the website, but no time or money was spent on advertising. How do you expect your potential btc customer when word never got out in the first place? You even admit the products you sell is a niche.

I can take BTC. Just point your phone here or copy this address:

https://i.imgur.com/iEBMmde.png
1M72Sfpbz1BPpXFHz9m3CdqATR44Jvaydd

https://blockchain.info/address/1M72Sfpbz1BPpXFHz9m3CdqATR44Jvaydd

So complicated...

Merchants need POS apps, plugins, API's and shopping carts as Bitcoin remains volatile. They cannot price their goods and services in BTC directly and shouldn't be expected to need to manually change their prices every 10 minutes.

Maybe your product sucks. How many orders have you received in fiat?

Why don't you just use Bitcoin the way it was intended to be used?   Get a receiving address and post it on your site.  You don't need Coinbase.  Or BitPay.  If you need something to "convert" the price, that can easily be created.  And I'm sure something exists somewhere. 

Bitcoin "Merchant Services" are a legacy concept that exist because legacy systems are too afraid to use Bitcoin the way it was intended, yet.  Nobody is stopping you from accepting Bitcoin payments the "direct" way.

-B-

Tough luck.

Right. They just need to automatically change their price once a minute.

The basic service Coinbase provides is that they'll guarantee a Bitcoin buy price to a merchant for a minute or two. This removes market risk from the merchant.

There are also auto-convert bitcoin addresses offered by exchanges and processors. Send bitcoin to the address and it auto-converts to USD. You can also use a simple API bot and auto-sell bitcoin to USD on the exchange...

For a project that took weeks to adopt the Coinbase API, you would expect some serious effort. Most open source carts appear to offer bitcoin integration, I'll have a look later and see if I can help :)