Best practice for accepting bitcoin payments?

[jl6]

Hi all.

I am investigating accepting bitcoins as payment on my website (which is nothing fancy), and it seems to me that the process looks something like this:

1. Run bitcoind.
2. Customer indicates that they wish to buy something.
3. Use getnewaddress API call to create a new address to which bitcoins can be sent.
4. Give this address to the customer, and tell them how much to pay.
5. Wait for a period of time, then use the getreceivedbyaddress API call to check whether the funds have been received to an appropriate level of confidence (say, 6 confirmations).
6. If the appropriate funds have been received, start your fulfilment process. If not, go back to step 5.

It's step 5 that bothers me; it requires a polling process to repeatedly perform the check, presumably with a timeout after which the order is cancelled. This seems inelegant and potentially resource intensive. Is there a better way?

Thanks,
James

[bluecmd]

There is some sort of monitor-patch in the merge request queue, that will probably help.

Otherwise it is not resource intensive to wait. Have a cronjob go through all pending transactions once every 10 minutes and finalize the order then.

[error]

Right, the monitortx patch will send a POST back to your website when a transaction comes in. You can then inform the user that payment was received and their order will be processed. After the transaction has a few confirmations (e.g. 6), you send it to the warehouse for fulfillment.

Remember that the Bitcoin payment address should be associated with the order/invoice, not merely the customer.