questions about accepting bitcoins in my website

[icordoba]

Hello,
I plan to accept bitcoin payments in a new startup website I am deploying now. I've tested some payments between different bitcoin wallets but I always get "unknown" in the "From" field of the received transactions.
I've also opened the bitcoin port and tested transactions to a IP and that way I get OK fields From: and Message:

My question is:
Is it a bug (not to see the payer address) or there is no bug and I have to ask my customers to pay to my IP to be able to know the payer address?

Thanks,
Ignacio

[1713954033]

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[1713954033]

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[khal]

It's a feature. You can't see the from address in the bitcoin client.
So, you have to generate an address for each payment and associate it whith your customer account.

You can see them manually on blockexplorer.com

[caveden]

A transfer may come from several different addresses. I think they've chosen not to display it in the UI in order not to pollute it. It's true that it would be nice to have this info in the transaction details, but there are higher priority developments before this.

If you really want to know the origins of your money, you can always use the blockexplorer. Just search for your receiving address.

[caveden]

Ah, and by the way, avoid I.P transfers.

[theymos]

It's not in the UI because someone might try to actually use it for something, which is wrong. It could belong to some random MyBitcoin user.

[Gavin Andresen]

My question is:
Is it a bug (not to see the payer address) or there is no bug and I have to ask my customers to pay to my IP to be able to know the payer address?

There is no bug, but if you want to know one of your customer's bitcoin addresses (maybe you want to send them a refund?) you must ask them.  They might be using an escrow service like ClearCoin or, as theymos says, using a shared wallet service like MyBitcoin.

[icordoba]

Thanks a lot for your replies,
about them...:

caveden, why do you recommend not to use IP transfers? There are security issues? They have the advantage of allowing the payer to identify with the From: and Message: fields.

If not,
what is the recommended approach to automatic process payments? I was going to use the RPC client to my server so customer:

- Makes order, in which gets a order id.
- Makes IP payment in which he sets that order id at From or Message field
- The software checks payments looking for order ids and sets the order paid generating final invoice.

If IP payments are not recommended and I have to use something like blockexplorer to check where I got those anonymous payments should I make:

- Customer makes order in which he sets his public bitcoin address
- Customer makes payment
- My software checks "blockexplorer" way looking for a payment from customer public address to my public address and set order as paid

is that right?

If so, can I use RPC client to check the transaction log looking for the searched address pair? If not, what about the brand new google java client? (I use Java JEE framework)

Thanks for your help,
Ignacio

[theymos]

You must generate a new address for each transaction. Track accounts by seeing which address you receive money at. Using Bitcoin Block Explorer is not necessary for this. Forget about seeing where money came from: instead look at where the money went to.

IP address transactions are insecure because any man-in-the-middle can intercept funds. There's also no way to send/receive IP transactions using RPC.

[icordoba]

OK. I just wanted to avoid creating an address for every payment. I'll use that approach then.

Thanks :-)
Ignacio