Question from newb about accepting Bitcoins for payment...

[LH66]

Hey there,

Been reading all I can find about Bitcoin and it sounds really great. I'm super excited about it. I am s/e and in a position to accept Bitcoins in exchange for my services.

I want to make sure I understand how I accept them. From what I can see, if somebody wants to pay with Bitcoins all I do is give them my Bitcoin password/key that I got from MyBitcoin.com. Is this correct? Is it really that easy or am I missing something?

Also, right now I would tie the Bitcoin price to the dollar, but I am afraid of the dollar inflating greatly. How do I manage the Bitcoin price for my services if/when the dollar begins to inflate greatly?

Thank you for your time.

Jennifer

[Garrett Burgwardt]

Well ideally you'd give them a price too, I suppose

But yes, it is essentially as simple as that. If you want to get more technical and manage your own money, then you would install the client and deal with your wallet.dat file yourself - Mybitcoin does that for you, in exchange for  you trusting them. But that's more advanced stuff and if you want to just get started right away, then use Mybitcoin

I've got nothing bad to say about Mybitcoin, just to be clear. They provide an excellent service and without them I'd imagine it would be much harder for many people to get started.

[RodeoX]

Not familiar with MyBitcoin.com, but any payment you will receive will require the sender to have your receiving address. This address can/should change. So send your key (not password) to the buyer.

As far as pricing services and goods in this kind of market, not sure.

[Cryptoman]

It is recommended that you provide a new address for each transaction.  That way, you will have no problem figuring out what the payment was for.  As far as setting exchange rates, I recommend taking an average over 24 or 48 hours so as to smooth out some of the variation.  You can see some averages on bitcoinwatch.com.  You can use the Ruby script below to compute a 48-hour weighted average, which could be used once per day to update prices on a web site. 

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'open-uri'
require 'json'
total_vol = 0.0
price_vol_product = 0.0
last = 0.0
quote_str = open('http://mtgox.com/code/data/getTrades.php').read
quotes = JSON.parse(quote_str)
#puts quotes
quotes.each do |q|
   price_vol_product += q["price"] * q["amount"]
   total_vol += q["amount"]
   last = q["price"]
end
usd_per_btc = price_vol_product/total_vol
printf("Exchange rate:%7.4f\n", usd_per_btc)

[LH66]

Thank you everybody!