Bitcoin subscriptions

[Anonymous]

Is there a way to implement subscription payments using bitcoin?

Say you would like to donate once a month to your favourite charity or content provider such as a podcast without having to remember to manually process the payment?

One less reason to use a credit card!

[Gavin Andresen]

Unix and Mac and Windows all have ways of scheduling recurring tasks (Linux: crontab, Mac: crontab, or I think iCal can do it, Windows... I dunno).

So if you're a little bit geeky, you could arrange for "bitcoin sendtoaddress 1mJMYFAVORITECHARITY9R4 amount" to get run once a month.  (just run bitcoin with the -server flag).

[Strofcon]

I haven't had much luck finding all the options that can be passed to bitcoin/bitcoind when it's run... -connect, -addnode, and -server are the ones I've seen so far. Are there others?
What exactly does -server do? Also, it seems that -connect and -addnode have pretty similar functionality... My best guess is that -connect is to force only one explicit connection to be made, whereas -addnode just says "make all the connections you want, but by golly you better connect to <IP>, if nothing else." Is that at least close to right?

[theymos]

Try "bitcoin -?" for a list.

[EricJ2190]

Windows... I dunno

Windows has Task Scheduler, or you can use of one various cron clones.

[jgarzik]

IMO, the bitcoin client should have a subscription manager.

[lachesis]

-1 for now.

I think keeping the vanilla client as plain as possible is a good thing. These things can easily be implemented in other clients, but the one on this site should serve as a sort of "reference". We should also focus on the JSON-RPC API so that other clients can interface with this one instead of having to modify it.

[nenolod]

IMO, the bitcoin client should have a subscription manager.

i've never used the ui client, but if the linux client exposed itself via dbus, you could write your own subscription manager.

alternatively, put this in your crontab:

0 0 0 0 */1 bitcoin -server sendtoaddress whatever amount-in-btc

this will invoke bitcoin from the commandline and send the money.

[jgarzik]

i've never used the ui client, but if the linux client exposed itself via dbus, you could write your own subscription manager.

alternatively, put this in your crontab:

0 0 0 0 */1 bitcoin -server sendtoaddress whatever amount-in-btc

Sure, I can do this.  But the supposition and suggestion were more general.

If bitcoins are to be successful, there needs to be a subscription system accessible to Aunt Tillie.

[lachesis]

If bitcoins are to be successful, there needs to be a subscription system accessible to Aunt Tillie.

This belongs outside the main client. There's no reason you can't write a trivial system in Python or something, but there's also no reason to clutter up my Bitcoin client with that.

I wonder if there's any viable way to make a simple extension system for Bitcoin? It seems like it would be a lot of work...