Bitcoin Forum

Greetings, one of the primary uses for cryptocurrency as set out in the original whitepaper written by Satoshi Nakamoto, was for them to be used as payments for goods and services online, similar to a digital cash.

The primary difficulty in using cryptocurrency as a payment method, is providing secure evidence of who sent the transaction. This has so far been accomplished by assigning one or more unique addresses each time a payment is required. This has the flaw of being very complicated to accomplish using a code based solution, and therefore will generally be pursued by a few perhaps only one company. This is our current situation with bitpay and litepay. These payment solutions are very tedious and complex to maintain, and because of this, only a few cryptocurrency is available as a payment method, and a single third party is responsible for ensuring those payment methods are secure and effective.

I am introducing an easy to use payment solution for goods and services online with any cryptocurrency and using only a single public receiving address for each type of currency accepted.

The solution is to email, or otherwise send via a timestamped communications method, with the sender previding their details, the exact amount of cryptocurrency that will be sent. For example, if you wanted to sell a pizza for $9.99 and you accepted litecoin, the amount to send would be 9.99/[Litecoin_Price]=[Amount_To_Send]. For example, the current price of litecoin as of this article, is about $121 usd.

9.99/121=0.08256198 LTC.

The exact amount to send will change as the price fluctuates, and will be unique for each transaction. The buyer first calculates how much will be sent and emails the seller how many coins will be sent exactly  before actually sending the coins. Then the buyer sends the calculated amount to the public address. The seller knows without doubt who sent the coins, because the timestamped email with the amount sent, will be before the transaction's timestamp as recorded in the blockchain.