As a store owner who accepts bitcoins, anyone who wants can track my income

[szangvil]

I decided to accept bitcoins in my online store only to realize that anyone who wants can type in my wallet address into the block explorer and see each and every transaction made to my address. This way, anyone can know hoe much money my business is making.  Today I obviously keep this data secret and never publish sales data...

Isn't that a HUGE reason for businesses not to accept bitcoins?

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[pc]

That's one of the reasons why the best practice is to generate a new address for every transaction.

[tutkarz]

That's one of the reasons why the best practice is to generate a new address for every transaction.

Its easy to do and when you get used to it then it makes work even easier. No need to look for transactions in a wallet when you can simply check one address and tell if it has funds or not.

[pinger]

That's one of the reasons why the best practice is to generate a new address for every transaction.

Its easy to do and when you get used to it then it makes work even easier. No need to look for transactions in a wallet when you can simply check one address and tell if it has funds or not.

But you should be alert of the backups being done daily, and I don't know how much can it cost to transfer the small transactions to one address.

[Lethn]

Bitcoin addresses seem to work a lot like I.P addresses, yes, people can see what you're doing, but you can always take steps to mask that and like with I.P addresses because there are so many of them it would take a particularly determined person to find out what's going into your account. I'm pretty sure though as people have said there are methods to avoid people stalking a particular address to find out just how much you're getting. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future people started developing VPN style security specifically for Bitcoin addresses so people can't spy on you at all.

I find Bitshop particularly interesting because it stores the Bitcoins on a code and you can take it out like a seperate account from that code to your Bitcoin client so maybe you should look at something like that perhaps for your business, it is a concern, don't get me wrong, but like with I.P addresses I think people shouldn't be too worried just yet until we start hearing about courts using Bitcoin addresses as viable evidence or criminals actively stalking addresses that shift a lot of Bitcoin.

[Jace]

I pre-generate 3000 addresses (+private keys of course, but they're not on the webserver) and backup those once.
In the webshop, for every new purchase a take an unused address from my pool. I can simply check that particular address to see if the payment has been made. Simple as pie.

[cosmicboy]

blockchain.info has an api that makes it easy to automatically generate new addresses.

[szangvil]

I am sorry to say, but it not user friendly at all.
Keeping track of so many addresses can be a real pain especially if I am a successful shop with 10 - 100 transaction a day.
It seems that bitcoin is not suitable for large scale # of transactions.

[wumpus]

I am sorry to say, but it not user friendly at all.
Keeping track of so many addresses can be a real pain especially if I am a successful shop with 10 - 100 transaction a day.
It seems that bitcoin is not suitable for large scale # of transactions.

How would you need to "keep track" of all the addresses? How do they give you more work? Addresses in bitcoin are very lightweight, and it's no problem to have thousands of them.
In retrospect calling them addresses was a bad idea, they should have been called "one time payment codes".

[Birdy]

You could also have 1 adress for every new customer.

[Schrankwand]

I am sorry to say, but it not user friendly at all.
Keeping track of so many addresses can be a real pain especially if I am a successful shop with 10 - 100 transaction a day.
It seems that bitcoin is not suitable for large scale # of transactions.

If you can store an email adress, you can store a payment adress. And also, you could do a transaction towards a forwarding adress that forwards again with not additional costs and problems and have everything sent to one wallet adress, if you wanted to.

[NLNico]

I am sorry to say, but it not user friendly at all.
Keeping track of so many addresses can be a real pain especially if I am a successful shop with 10 - 100 transaction a day.
It seems that bitcoin is not suitable for large scale # of transactions.

A lot of businesses use BitPay: https://bitpay.com/ (an alternative would be https://walletbit.com/ ) Especially because most businesses cannot risk for the Bitcoin price to go down and potentially lose dollars ("volatility risk".) But BitPay would probably solve "your" problem too? Obviously there is a fee involved (0.99% I believe - which is at least smaller than 3-4% of PayPal/creditcard.)

[Ditto]

And also, you could do a transaction towards a forwarding adress that forwards again with not additional costs and problems and have everything sent to one wallet adress, if you wanted to.

People can still track his income if everything is forwarded to one wallet, unless he uses a mixer.

[Mahn]

I am sorry to say, but it not user friendly at all.
Keeping track of so many addresses can be a real pain especially if I am a successful shop with 10 - 100 transaction a day.
It seems that bitcoin is not suitable for large scale # of transactions.

You do realize you can keep track of the addresses programatically, right? One would just need to code a service that abstracts this once.

[Driice]

You could also have 1 adress for every new customer.

This idea seems the best imo

[Littleshop]

I am sorry to say, but it not user friendly at all.
Keeping track of so many addresses can be a real pain especially if I am a successful shop with 10 - 100 transaction a day.
It seems that bitcoin is not suitable for large scale # of transactions.

Consider bitpay.com or other similar service. 

[gyverlb]

The OP is more and more likely to be a troll.

Notice that even though he understood that nobody can track his income if he uses Bitcoin properly (either generating one address per payment or using a payment platform like Bitpay) he didn't change his FUD title and instead switched to a "it's too complicated" rhetoric.

[BTC Books]

I decided to accept bitcoins in my online store only to realize that anyone who wants can type in my wallet address into the block explorer and see each and every transaction made to my address. This way, anyone can know hoe much money my business is making.  Today I obviously keep this data secret and never publish sales data...

Isn't that a HUGE reason for businesses not to accept bitcoins?

Ummm... no.

Aside from all the points in this thread about the simplicity of generating one address per sale, and so on (keeping multiple wallets for item categories, & etc.) - nobody knows how much your business is 'making' (i'm guessing you mean net income?) unless they have access to your Cost of Goods information.  Even assuming anyone would go to the trouble of tracking down every bitcoin address you assigned to every sale, without CoG and overhead information your raw gross is pretty meaningless.

I'm also going to take a guess that you're accepting forms of payment other than bitcoin.  And since these other payment types (credit cards and so forth) are managed by folks who give no thought to anything other than your best interests; and who would never dream of using, selling, or otherwise disseminating that information - to all comers, and for pennies - without your expressed consent, I guess your secrets are safe, hmmm?  [ / snark ]

[John (John K.)]

You're never supposed to use a single address for all transactions. 

[m3whiteknight]

how about use one address for a day and the next day use a new address. This way they will not know your total take in and easier for owner to manage.