BitCoinEverywhere (Firefox Plugin)

[giszmo]

Hi guys,

with the firefox plugin bitCoinEverywhere installed you can shop in all the online shops that are adopted by the plugin and when you are presented the shop's payment options you will be given one extra option - guess what - bitCoin. The plugin charges you 5% extra and gives you the weighted average price of the last hour for your purchase and will do a paypal, moneybookers, bank transfer, whatever payment as soon as you've sent the bitcoins demanded to the bitcoin address shown on your behalf. The plugin will find the which data to send with the payment (bill number, name, etc). With green-addresses, this can be processed with no delay compared to a direct paypal payment.

Sad thing is this plugin does not exist. I see several issues but also great potential to such a service.

Problems:

• Shop owners might not want plugins to mess with their payment processing.
• Every payment update in the shop could lead to a broken plugin so QA might be extremely costly.
• Payment providers like paypal, moneybookers and even banks might close the accounts after the 3rd payment.
• The plugin provider would need to have quite some cash in moneybookers, paypal and bank account so the clients can use all these methods at all time. After all sending the received bitcoins to Gox, cash out the dollars and send them to paypal again takes several days if not weeks.

Oportunities:

• I suspect bitcoin owners to be willing to pay 5% fees for payments if they can use bitcoins at amazon today
• there are shop solutions used in hundreds of shops so covering one would mean covering all that use the unchanged payment module
• Some shops might not notice the plugin as payments flow without any chargebacks. Fraud management is probably not alerted.
• Shop owners might cooperate as they never have to deal with bitcoins and as long as they don't do this weird bitcoin thing, nobody can blame them for accepting extra customers all paying with the same bank account.

I'm bringing this up here as I don't see any way of running this alone or with people I know and have no time to do the business plan and search for investors now. Do you think this would be a cool thing? A doable thing? Maybe a substantial subset like payment processing for shop owners without client side plugin but a lib installed on their frontend server?

Any comments welcome

[1714829801]

1714829801

[Alex Zee]

If I understand correctly, you suggest that bitcoins are sent to the plugin maker and he, in turn, sends whatever method the site accepts?

a) This is not clear from the legal point of view. Sites expect your money from your account.

b) It is close to impossible to implement securely. If plugin will "fill-in" a form with credit card info of the plugin maker you can intercept it. Or change the order amount.
And you can't send your site's password to the plugin maker to pay for you.

What about Bitcoin2cc? Buying virtual credit card for bitcoins? It will somewhat solve the problem of Amazon purchases.

[giszmo]

Bit-pay does exactly what I suggest in my final sentence - the bitcoin part of the payment for the shop owner. Payment processors should not have serious legal issues here.

Ok, I confess I didn't describe all the issues but the security concerns are manageable I guess. The customer collects items, gets to the payment options and confirms his purchase with the plugin activated. Now the plugin intercepts the final confirmation, the plugin provider's server kicks in by starting a new shopping session (or taking over the old one), does the payment part and actually sends once the bitcoins arrived. Shipping details can be set within the plugin or taken from the ordering process, credit card details are not in reach of the customer ...

bitcoin2cc is super expensive and doesn't work btw. 24% fees right now and the purchase button just does nothing here.