Well theres a few ways to do it, ranging in difficulty:
The most basic way is to run bitcoind, a headless wallet, on a linux server, this is what I think they are doing, since their website went up in a time when bitcoin was less advanced than now in terms of online services. This method is as safe as your server is, I believe there was a scandal on lithium host where one of the employees simply opened up a customers vps and took the wallet.dat and thus were able to steal coins for themselves.
Another easier way, is to just use an online service, like bitpay, blockchain, or coinbase, and just listen for callbacks on a url you specified. This is easier and was less worries, as coinbase, bitpay, or blockchain take lots of precaution to prevent stolen coins and would possibly spot with their own money a theft (unlikely if large amount). These services usually have nicely generated html buttons to put on your website and actual payment pages you can setup.
An interesting service is inputs.io, they sorta function like visa in which you can pay/get paid with bitcoins, but the transaction happens off the blockchain, and instantly. Off the blockchain in the sense that when you pay with a credit card, actual physical money isn't being moved.The also provide a payment button html code generator and pretty easy api to work with.
Bitcoind, you are going to definately need knowledge of how to program. Online services, less so depending on what you will be doing, running a poker site you will 100% need to put together something in a programming lanuage.
just saw inputs.io sounds pretty interesting wonder who else would use it and whether i should trust it. i don't want to have to rely on some other site though.
Hi, I'm the main developer behind Inputs. Feel free to ask me any questions, or
support@inputs.io (latter will net you a faster response time unless it's very technical).
Inputs builds up top of the blockchain, stripping away the scaling and performance limitations, as well as security measures that bitcoin-qt can't implement (disallow logins from Tor/anonymous proxies if your account was not made with one, rate throttling, and tons more). We've handled more than 10,000 BTC in volume so far. If you'd like to implement it, see
https://inputs.io/api and
https://inputs.io/button - you need to trust your online wallet provider through, and it's a good idea to do due diligence (and not just listen to me
) before deciding on a wallet solution.
If you'd like to implement Bitcoind, you can use something like jsonrpcclient. You can see a list of API commands here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_calls_list #bitcoin-dev is a good IRC channel to get advice (you'll need to register your nick with Freenode first).
Note that you should patch bitcoind to fix some bugs, and if you get big you'll need to look into scaling. It's a good idea to manually addnode the largest mining pools like BTCGuild so you get transactions faster.
If you're new to web development / programming, please please put in the effort to make it secure and get outside eyes to look at your code before launch. The amount of basic security vulnerabilities in bitcoin sites is horrifying. People think that making a site that handles money is as simple as reading two o'reilly books - it's much more than that.
