Iphone/Webphone bitcoin payment app?

[unclescrooge]

Hello everybody,

I'm new here, and pretty exited about the potential of bitcoin. It has the potential to change the world. But it has no intrinsic value, and the only thing that will give it value is not its price on market exchanger, but the things that you can buy with.

The more sellers accept bitcoin as mean of payment, the more things and services you can buy with, the highest the value of bitcoin. This is critical! There is already a few website accepting bitcoin, although it's not always very clear, and most of the time the price is based on the btc/usd exchange rate.

So we have to develop easy way for merchants to accept this currency. A "one-click to work" kind of api /software. And it included irl merchants. And i'm not talking about the prepaid card that you can buy with bitcoin (which still doesn't give btc any intrinsic value), i'm talking about a way to transfer bitcoin to the vendor account in his physical store (which give btc a value, since the vendor accept it as a way of payment).

So, I'm thinking about a webphone app, to start with, that would use bluetooth to get the address of the receiver. It would go something like this:
-The app would be a bitcoin client, connecting to your wallet online on services like mybitcoin or using a wallet.dat on the webphone (with online backup service of course).
-When you want to pay someone with btc, you click on a send button on the app, it shows you a list of bluetooth device you can connect with.
-you select the bluetooth device of the receiver. The two devices connect with each other and your app ask for the btc address of the receiver.
-your app then goes on the internet, like a normal btc client, to make the payment to the receiver.
-there you go with your product bought with btc!

What do you think? What would be the difficulties with this? Does anyone have the skills to help program such an app? I'm interested in hearing all your ideas, suggestions,... anything to make this project go on.

Raphy

[1715254802]

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[1715254802]

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[1715254802]

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[1715254802]

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[tcatm]

js-remote ( http://tcatm.github.com/bitcoin-js-remote ) does something very similar. Except it doesn't use bluetooth, but QR codes.

[Quip]

Funny, I was about to write a thoughtful post about a theoretical Bitcoin POS system that would handle transactions via QRcodes or Near Field Communication using an Android/IOs app. It's nice to see that someone has already written a platform-independent way to do this with QR codes! Now all we need to do is get the Bitcoin node running on the actual device, and find a way to speed up verifications, and we can make vending machines.

[tcatm]

Actually I'd rather like a wallet service (js-remote will work with something that uses a bitcoin RPC interface) so we can't loose data on phones.

[Quip]

Good point. I actually haven't been able to get js-remote to work, but it's essentially perfect. I'd like to see a wallet service like MyBitCoin implement it, so that you could more easily control the BitCoins you have "in the bank". That would also solve the verification speed problem, as MyBitCoin verifies the BitCoins when you deposit them, so the theoretical vending machine could instantly accept payments from MyBitCoin users.

[Mike Hearn]

See here:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3017.0