I am new to bitcoin, and my balance is up in my wallet, now close to .09 BTC! woo hoo! Many thanks to everyone on this forum that has passed me a few cBTC to help get me going, I really appreciate it!
Now, I am researching programing for Bitcoin, mainly accepting bitcoins on websites, and letting merchants also send bitcoins (in case of refunds, etc)
Right off the bat, I see on the wiki the php dev intro:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/PHP_developer_introSomething that jumps out at me on this is the need for a bitcoin client on the server. This will not be possible in the vast majority of sites (think of a wordpress site on a shared host). In addition, even if you can run it, then you have to go through the process of downloading the whole transaction history, which is starting to get big (several GB). This is not a suitable solution for most sites. I don't think it is even really usable for most people, honestly.
So, looking at options, I see blockchain.info has an API that let's you interact with their wallet. I like this approach, no need for the big download, no need to host the wallet on your server, so you are letting them help with security.
Blockchain.info seems to be a popular wallet, I have a wallet there, as well as a QT wallet that I installed the other day and is STILL doing the original sync.
But, now, I am seeing several blockchain.info APIs. Does anyone have experience working with these in a e-commerce site? I think it could work pretty well with just the simple wallet API, but for better security, probably their JSON RPC API would be better. Have the merchant get a blockchain.info wallet (and recommend customers to do the same for ease), then be able to send and receive payments using the API. Simple. In theory.
You would probably want to create a new address for each transaction, and store customer addresses, in case you need to do a refund, don't know if that is possible. But generally, looks like it could work pretty well.
Does anyone have experience doing this, maybe some sample php I could look at?